Shared behavior control of a robotic cane based on interactive technology

Robotic aids, such as robotic canes, require cooperation between the human and robots. The proper control commands for such systems would be a combination of autonomous commands from robots and commands from the human rather than either autonomous commands or human commands alone. Autonomous commands can be generated by reactive control approaches that produce timely response of motor behaviors coupling perception and action. User commands can be generated by user's heuristic decisions based on tactile and auditory information about the environments. Various methods to implement the appropriately coordinating behaviors are being investigated. We outline a set of hardware solutions and working methodologies that can be used for successfully implementing and extending the interactive technology to coordinate the human and robot in the complicated and unstructured environments. To explore the potential for rich and varied interactions with the world, we let our robotic cane explore the environments with simple sensing mechanisms and we let our robotic cane's autonomous behaviors share human's flexible and reactive decision capabilities with blind user's superb tactile and auditory information processing capabilities.