Project Idea
Previous Work: Assistive feeding robot developed by personal robotics lab not only helps people who cannot feed themselves but also help their caregivers reduce the time-consuming workload of feeding. However, they forget another important thing. After feeding food to those disabled people, there might be trash left to be thrown away. For example, the trash includes the packages of the snacks, the plastic plates, and other plastic containers.
Problem: Although throwing away trash after feeding is not as time-consuming as feeding, it still creates considerable workloads for caregivers to throw away all trash. These workloads of caregivers can be better used by caregivers to talk to disabled people and give those disabled people more emotional support. In addition, the assistive feeding robot cannot really help people without caregivers without another robot designed to throw away trash. Throwing trash requires 2 essential abilities of the human body: 1) the ability to walk to a trash can. 2) the ability to pick up trash. Although wheelchairs are used by people who cannot walk, it’s still more convenient for them to have a robot to help them throw away trash since the angle and height of trash can may not be suitable for them to comfortably sit on the wheelchairs and throw trash into the trash can, e.g. the trash can is a bit too high. This means that not only people who cannot use their hands/lose their hands but also people who cannot walk need help from a robot to throw away trash. In the United States, 3.6 million people cannot walk. (Americans with Disabilities) In addition, there’re around 2.1 million people who have limb loss in America. (15-limb-loss-statistics-may-surprise) Therefore, it’s reasonable to estimate that there’s at least 1 percent of the American population need robot to help them throw away trash, making the problem of throwing trash a meaningful problem.
Solution: On the fetch platform, we can program a robot to pick the plastic food containers, such as plates and bowls. Then, the robot can carry the plate to a trash can and throws it into the trash can. I believe this problem perfectly suits the robotic technology because 1) trash and trash can are non-living things with mobility and it’s easy for a robot to self-navigate to the designated places and perform the tasks. 2) Such task dealing with non-living matters should be the workloads of robots, not humans. Humans, both disabled people and caregivers can use extra-time given by trash-throwing robots to do something more meaningful to humans, such as talking and giving emotional support to each other.
Tractability: This trash-throwing task is actually much easier than the feeding task. Both trash cans and plastic food containers are easy to model and they’re not deformable targets. The trajectory between a robot and trash can is easy to calculate, at least much easier than calculating the trajectory to a human mouth, since the trash can does not move. If a fetch robot can be trained to pick up small food pieces, it can also be trained to pick the plastic food containers since those containers are much larger and require less delicacy during transfer. Thus, I believe my solution is tractable.
Source:
Americans with Disabilities: 2010 www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p70-131.pdf
https://accessprosthetics.com/15-limb-loss-statistics-may-surprise/