Human-like behavior robot-application to disabled people assistance

In the field of rehabilitation robotics, a mobile personal robot represents an attractive solution, even in economical terms, in comparison with a desktop workstation. The assistance system ARPH is composed of a manipulator arm mounted on a mobile robot. In order to avoid the increasing complexity due to the need of system autonomy in a partially known environment, our approach is based on a close man-machine cooperation. The disabled person and the system provide their skills and execute missions by a dynamic task-sharing. The first condition for a good cooperation is that the person understands how the robot works. It is made easier if robot autonomous functions have human-like behaviours. The paper presents this approach for the main functions required for the robot displacement: planning, navigation and to a minor extend localisation. Man-machine cooperation is evaluated by an experiment in which users control the mobile robot during a "go to the target" mission.