Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects (NSERC partnered)

Through exploring the environment a child develops cognitive and perceptual skills. Children with physical disabilities who have difficulty manipulating objects may miss opportunities for meaningful exploration of their environment. However, children with disabilities have been motivated to use robotic systems to manipulate items during play activities. One limitation with present robotic systems is that children do not get to feel what the robot is touching. Not having this haptic feedback prevents children from sensing the properties of objects. Also, the robots either controls all of the task, so the child is only an observer, or none of the task, but the child may not be capable of doing it on their own yet. It is better for the robot system to learn how much guidance to provide as the child's skills develop. We propose to use a haptic and adaptive guidance approach. It will allow two users, a child with a disability and an adult partner, to collaboratively control a robot with two haptic interfaces. We will adaptively change the amount of control from one user or the other by using real-time artificial intelligence. This way, as the child increases his/her understanding, he/she can do more of the task. And eventually the system will learn how to help the child so that the second user is not needed. After developing the necessary interface and software we will do studies to see if the system makes a difference to how children perform tasks. We will compare when children do tasks with a typical robot and do tasks with our haptic graduated and adaptive guidance approach. We will compare the time and accuracy it takes to do tasks and behavioral acts. At the end of the project, children with disabilities will have access to a robotic system to help them explore their environments and have a rich learning experience.