ARPH-assistant robot for handicapped people-a pluridisciplinary project

Several projects are in progress in the field of disabled people assistance. Their main particularity is pluridisciplinarity. Technological solutions must be validated by psychologists and disabled people at each step of development to be accepted by end users. ARPH is a manipulator arm mounted on a mobile robot which aims at restoring the manipulative function of an handicapped person. The localisation of the mobile base in indoor partially known environment is an important point. Automatic movements of the mobile robot have already been studied. The analysis of different shared control modes is in progress. Human-machine cooperation is one of the main focus points of the project. Disabled people want to act on the system but do not want to see it working on its own. More, human intervention in the control permits to limit the complexity of the system. In order to make this cooperation effective, the main idea is to give the robot human-like behaviours.