Design and Implementation of a Modular Human-Robot Interaction Framework

With the increasing longevity that accompanies advances in medical technology comes a host of other age-related disabilities. Among these are neuro-degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer\u27s disease, Parkinson\u27s disease, and stroke, which significantly reduce the motor and cognitive ability of affected individuals. As these diseases become more prevalent, there is a need for further research and innovation in the field of motor rehabilitation therapy to accommodate these individuals in a cost-effective manner. In recent years, the implementation of social agents has been proposed to alleviate the burden on in-home human caregivers. Socially assistive robotics (SAR) is a new subfield of research derived from human-robot interaction that aims to provide hands-off interventions for patients with an emphasis on social rather than physical interaction. As these SAR systems are very new within the medical field, there is no standardized approach to developing such systems for different populations and therapeutic outcomes. The primary aim of this project is to provide a standardized method for developing such systems by introducing a modular human-robot interaction software framework upon which future implementations can be built. The framework is modular in nature, allowing for a variety of hardware and software additions and modifications, and is designed to provide a task-oriented training structure with augmented feedback given to the user in a closed-loop format. The framework utilizes the ROS (Robot Operating System) middleware suite which supports multiple hardware interfaces and runs primarily on Linux operating systems. These design requirements are validated through testing and analysis of two unique implementations of the framework: a keyboard input reaction task and a reaching-to-grasp task. These implementations serve as example use cases for the framework and provide a template for future designs. This framework will provide a means to streamline the development of future SAR systems for research and rehabilitation therapy