In this section
@inproceedings{Gu:2024:10.1109/iros58592.2024.10801478,
author = {Gu, Y and Demiris, Y},
doi = {10.1109/iros58592.2024.10801478},
pages = {8936--8943},
publisher = {IEEE},
title = {Learning bimanual manipulation policies for bathing bed-bound people},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/iros58592.2024.10801478},
year = {2024}
}
TY - CPAPER
AB - Assistive robots hold promise in enhancing the quality of life for older adults and people with mobility impairments in daily bed bathing routines. When providing bathing assistance to bed-bound people, human caregivers often support the joints when lifting the arms and legs to properly wash and dry occluded areas. This research introduces a novel approach to robotic bed bathing manipulation, where a bimanual robot learns to lift a target limb while controlling a cleaning tool to bath the surface within safe force bounds. To ensure safe, cooperative bath manipulation, our work combines Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework with a variable impedance action space enabling adaptive interaction with the environment and carefully-designed reward functions regulating contact force on the human body. Simulation results demonstrate improved bathing area coverage compared to unimanual models and exhibit great adaptability to contact-rich interaction within a safe force boundary. We validate our approach across various human body sizes, showcasing its generalizability. We also transfer our models to a physical Baxter robot bathing a medical-grade manikin. We further incorporate a force tracking controller with the trained models to enhance adaptation to noisy real-world bathing scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first robot-assisted bed bathing application that performs autonomous bathing around the human body using bimanual robot arms.
AU - Gu,Y
AU - Demiris,Y
DO - 10.1109/iros58592.2024.10801478
EP - 8943
PB - IEEE
PY - 2024///
SP - 8936
TI - Learning bimanual manipulation policies for bathing bed-bound people
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/iros58592.2024.10801478
UR - https://doi.org/10.1109/iros58592.2024.10801478
ER -
