Simplifying Wheelchair Mounted Robotic Arm Control with a Visual Interface

Wheelchair mounted robotic arms can assist people that have severe physical handicaps with activities of daily life. Manufacturer-provided direct input devices may not correlate well to the user’s motor skills and may require a high level of cognitive awareness. Our goal is to provide methods for independent manipulation of objects in unstructured environments utilizing a wheelchair mounted robotic arm for manipulation. We hypothesized that users would prefer a simple visual instead of the default interface provided by the manufacturer and that with greater levels of autonomy, less user input is necessary for control. An experiment was designed and conducted to investigate these hypotheses.