Project Idea: Floor Object Picker
Target User Group: elderly people with a certain level of mobility limitations, for example, Low Back Pain (LBP).
Problem: It all happens to us once in a while, that we accidentally drop sth onto the floor. It might seem easy enough for normal people to simply pick them up, but it is very challenging for people with mobility limitations to do that. For example, my girlfriend’s father has been suffering from LBP for a couple years, and he finds it quite painful every single time he tries to pick sth up from the floor, and he needs people to carry heavy bags for him.
Robotic Solution: I hereby propose building a ROS application on the Fetch robot, which constantly goes around in the room and looks for objects on the floor plane. Whenever it detects an object, it will pick it up and present the item to any human in the scene (by walking towards the person while holding the object). A physical assistance robot is a perfect solution in this case, coz it allows the target user group to get back objects on the floor without the help of other people. No other technology can offer this level of physical mobility other than a robot :)
Tractability and Feasibility: The proposed solution is designed for a very specific task, where the goal is unambiguous and level of success is very easy to measure: whether the robot is able to detect objects on the floor and pick them up, and whether the robot is able to identify human and walk toward them. There should be challengings like size limitation of objects that the Fetch’s gripper can handle and etc., but prototyping this idea should be quite feasible.