Adaptive Shared Control for a Novel Mobile Assistive Robot

This paper presents a new adaptive servo-level shared control scheme for a mobile assistive robot that aims at assisting senior and disabled people to transport heavy objects in a complex environment with obstacles. Several technical problems and challenges related to the assistive robotic system and the shared controller are addressed. Specifically, a nonlinear tracking controller is developed for the robot to follow the user. An obstacle avoidance controller is developed based on the deformable virtual zone principle for the robot to avoid obstacles. The adaptive servo-level shared controller utilizes the tracking controller and the obstacle avoidance controller's outputs to generate a new shared control output to command the robot. Experiments show that the user can guide the movement of the robot safely and smoothly in the complex environment with the developed controllers.