Meal Support System with Spoon

This paper presents an autonomous meal support robot system that can handle non-rigid solid food. The robot sys-tem is equipped with a laser range finder (LRF) and a ma-nipulator holding a spoon. The LRF measures the 3D co-ordinates of surface points belonging to food on a plate. Then the robot determines the position of food surface to scoop, and the manipulator moves according to the calcu-lated trajectory. The system has an advantage that prepa-ration of food cutting in bite-size is not required. The pro-posed scooping control was implemented and verified in ex-periment with two kinds of non-rigid solid foods. It was shown that the robot can scoop foods for the most part with high success rate. 1