Towards Development of an Autonomous Robotic System for Beard Shaving Assistance for Disabled People

Neurological disorders, among the several other factors, are the causes of chronic disabilities where patients suffering from such disabilities usually remain unable to perform basic daily live activities. Tasks around the head are some of these activities which include shaving, brushing, eating and drinking. The current trend towards this area is the development of active assistive robotic systems that enable disabled people to achieve these tasks without human assistance. Rather than the active assistive robotic systems developed for tasks around the head, this paper presents our work towards the development of an autonomous robotic assistance system for the beard shaving task. A Kinect RGB-D sensor is utilized to detect the patient's face, recognize the beard regions based on selected geometrical features and subsequently plan optimal trajectories for fulfilling the intended shaving task. Once the pose of the patient face changes, the system still has the capability to online replanning the optimal trajectories taking into consideration the occlusion. A UR-10 six DOF manipulator, with an attached electrical beard trimmer, is simulated to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach. Simulation results demonstrated the capability of the proposed system to achieve beard shaving autonomously that could be extended in the future for fulfilling other tasks around the head.