MIT’s collaborative robot reads muscles to help users lift

[Music] We're looking at using wearable muscle Sensors to control a robot that's Helping me lift an object The robot can look at my biceps and Triceps activity to get a sense of how I'm moving my hand up and down as I'm Moving the object and then the robot can Roughly mirror those motions but I can Also just tend to relax my arm or make Small gestures to nudge the robot higher Or lower into a better position We have these two different ways to Control the robot while I'm working on The task one is the robot can Continuously estimate how I'm moving my Hand and roughly mirror those motions And the other is that a neural network Can detect gestures So these allow for continuous motion as Well as more fine-grained control There are a lot of different modalities That we can use to try to communicate With the robots we can use speech Vision Motion sensors in this case we're Looking at wearable sensors that can Detect motion or muscle signals and I Think each of these modalities have Different benefits in different Situations if we can better understand Each one then we can better understand How to combine them in different cases And have a richer interaction with the Robot

Foreign For this project in particular we're Looking at working with the robot on Physical tasks and for that muscle Signals can give you information about How the person is moving and about what They're trying to do with the object for Example you could also get signals such As how stiffly they're holding the Object if they're holding their arm Really tense or if they're getting tired You could look at fatigue and all of These types of signals might be a little Hard to get with other modalities such As Vision or speech but it can help the Robot better know how to assist you During the test [Music] One of the future extensions that we're Really excited about is allowing the Robot to learn more from how you're Controlling it and then the robot would Be able to predict more about how it can Help you and about your high level goals In the task instead of just the Immediate motions that you're trying to Connect We're starting to build out the Framework for this vocabulary of Communicating with the robot using these Wearable sensors Right now we're testing out how we can Best process these signals and as we Continue to add more gestures and more

Motions that we can extract from these Sensors then we can have a richer Communication with the robot and we can Tackle more complex motions and more Complex tests