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Beyond Cybathlon: On-demand Quadrupedal Assistance for People with Limited Mobility

Background: Assistance robots have the potential to increase the independence of people who need daily care due to limited mobility or being wheelchair-bound. Current solutions of attaching robotic arms to motorized wheelchairs offer limited additional mobility at the cost of increased size and reduced wheelchair maneuverability. Methods: We present an on-demand quadrupedal assistance robot system controlled via a shared autonomy approach, which combines semi-autonomous task execution with human teleoperation. Due to the mobile nature of the system it can assist the operator whenever needed and perform autonomous tasks independently, without otherwise restricting their mobility. We automate pick-and-place tasks, as well as robot movement through the environment with semantic, collision-aware navigation. For teleoperation, we present a mouth-level joystick interface that enables an operator with reduced mobility to control the robot's end effector for precision manipulation. Results: We showcase our system in the \textit{Cybathlon 2024 Assistance Robot Race}, and validate it in an at-home experimental setup, where we measure task completion times and user satisfaction. We find our system capable of assisting in a broad variety of tasks, including those that require dexterous manipulation. The user study confirms the intuition that increased robot autonomy alleviates the operator's mental load. Conclusions: We present a flexible system that has the potential to help people in wheelchairs maintain independence in everyday life by enabling them to solve mobile manipulation problems without external support. We achieve results comparable to previous state-of-the-art on subjective metrics while allowing for more autonomy of the operator and greater agility for manipulation.

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