CAREER: Extending Human Dexterity Through Hand-Held Continuum Robots

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will serve to promote the progress of science and to advance national health by providing new knowledge related to hand-held continuum robots. Such robots are promising—particularly for navigation through sensitive and constrained environments—because they enable a workflow like using manual tools and can combine the benefits of direct human operation with the precision and dexterity of robotic control.

However, the complex kinematics of continuum robots, along with the direct physical coupling of the human and robot, pose challenges for how to enable precise and intuitive control for operators. This project will investigate how different human-continuum robot interaction methods affect task performance, and insights will help guide the creation of new human-in-the-loop control methods and continuum robot designs.

The outcomes of this project have potential for significant societal impact by transforming task performance in several industries, including healthcare, inspection, and manufacturing. This project will also support an extensive education and outreach plan that includes the development of a new hand-held haptic device along with related hands-on lab activities designed to promote problem-based learning that will be used in both undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as in a series of workshops for local middle school students to increase exposure and excitement for STEM.

The objective of this project is to determine how different human-continuum robot interaction methods affect task performance and to test these approaches in the context of a hand-held concentric tube robot and a hand-held, steerable vine robot. To achieve this objective, the research will proceed with three main aims. The first aim focuses on developing methods for estimating and interpreting user intent to achieve seamless integration of manual and teleoperated input, as well as quantifying the effects of this integration on task performance.

The second aim focuses on improving robotic tool embodiment through automating the control of the robot shape and through incorporating haptic feedback. Finally, the third aim centers on evaluating the extent to which the principles of human-continuum robot interaction learned through the first two aims hold across multiple robot platforms. For this purpose, a new hand-held, steerable vine robot will be created and used for testing the applicability of the new methods.

Overall, this research will help advance the fields of flexible and soft robotics and human-robot interaction, enabling intuitive deployment of robots with shapes that can be controlled for safe and effective completion of tasks in constrained environments.

This project is supported by the cross-directorate Foundational Research in Robotics program, jointly managed and funded by the Directorates for Engineering (ENG) and Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.