Assistive machines - like powered wheelchairs, myoelectric prostheses and robotic arms - promote independence and ability in those with severe motor impairments. As the state- of-the-art in these assistive Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) advances, more dexterous and capable machines hold the promise to revolutionize ways in which those with motor impairments can interact within society and with their loved ones, and to care for themselves with independence. However, as these machines become more capable, they often also become more complex. Which raises the question: how to control this added complexity? A new paradigm is proposed for controlling complex assistive Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), like robotic arms mounted on wheelchairs, via simple low-dimensional control interfaces that are accessible to persons with severe motor impairments, like 2-D joysticks or 1-D Sip-N-Puff interfaces. Traditional interfaces cover only a portion of the control space, and during teleoperation it is necessary to switch between different control modes to access the full control space. Robotics automation may be leveraged to anticipate when to switch between different control modes. This approach is a departure from the majority of control sharing approaches within assistive domains, which either partition the control space and allocate different portions to the robot and human, or augment the human's control signals to bridge the dimensionality gap. How to best share control within assistive domains remains an open question, and an appealing characteristic of this approach is that the user is kept maximally in control since their signals are not altered or augmented. The public health impact is significant, by increasing the independence of those with severe motor impairments and/or paralysis. Multiple efforts will facilitate large-scale deployment of our results, including a collaboration with Kinova, a manufacturer of assistive robotic arms, and a partnership with Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. The proposal introduces a formalism for assistive mode-switching that is grounded in hybrid dynamical systems theory, and aims to ease the burden of teleoperating high-dimensional assistive robots. By modeling this CPS as a hybrid dynamical system, assistance can be modeled as optimization over a desired cost function. The system's uncertainty over the user's goals can be modeled via a Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes. This model provides the natural scaffolding for learning user preferences. Through user studies, this project aims to address the following research questions: (Q1) Expense: How expensive is mode-switching? (Q2) Customization Need: Do we need to learn mode-switching from specific users? (Q3) Learning Assistance: How can we learn mode-switching paradigms from a user? (Q4) Goal Uncertainty: How should the assistance act under goal uncertainty? How will users respond? The proposal leverages the teams shared expertise in manipulation, algorithm development, and deploying real-world robotic systems. The proposal also leverages the teams complementary strengths on deploying advanced manipulation platforms, robotic motion planning and manipulation, and human-robot co-manipulation, and on robot learning from human demonstration, control policy adaptation, and human rehabilitation. The proposed work targets the easier operation of robotic arms by severely paralyzed users. The need to control many degrees of freedom (DoF) gives rise to mode-switching during teleoperation. The switching itself can be cumbersome even with 2- and 3-axis joysticks, and becomes prohibitively so with more limited (1-D) interfaces. Easing the operation of switching not only lowers this burden on those already able to operate robotic arms, but may open use to populations to whom assistive robotic arms are currently inaccessible. This work is clearly synergistic: at the intersection of robotic manipulation, human rehabilitation, control theory, machine learning, human-robot interaction and clinical studies. The project addresses the science of CPS by developing new models of the interaction dynamics between the system and the user, the technology of CPS by developing new interfaces and interaction modalities with strong theoretical foundations, and the engineering of CPS by deploying our algorithms on real robot hardware and extensive studies with able-bodied and users with spinal cord injuries.

This CPS Frontiers project addresses highly dynamic Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), understood as systems where a computing delay of a few milliseconds or an incorrectly computed response to a disturbance can lead to catastrophic consequences. Such is the case of cars losing traction when cornering at high speed, unmanned air vehicles performing critical maneuvers such as landing, or disaster and rescue response bipedal robots rushing through the rubble to collect information or save human lives. The preceding examples currently share a common element: the design of their control software is made possible by extensive experience, laborious testing and fine tuning of parameters, and yet, the resulting closed-loop system has no formal guarantees of meeting specifications. The vision of the project is to provide a methodology that allows for complex and dynamic CPSs to meet real-world requirements in an efficient and robust way through the formal synthesis of control software. The research is developing a formal framework for correct-by-construction control software synthesis for highly dynamic CPSs with broad applications to automotive safety systems, prostheses, exoskeletons, aerospace systems, manufacturing, and legged robotics. The design methodology developed here will improve the competitiveness of segments of industry that require a tight integration between hardware and highly advanced control software such as: automotive (dynamic stability and control), aerospace (UAVs), medical (prosthetics, orthotics, and exoskeleton design) and robotics (legged locomotion). To enhance the impact of these efforts, the PIs are developing interdisciplinary teaching materials to be made freely available and disseminating their work to a broad audience.

This project will work with national and international medical and disaster professionals to extract formal use cases for ground, aerial, and marine robots for medical response and humanitarian relief to the Ebola (and future) epidemics. A set of detailed use cases is urgently needed to meet the challenges posed by the epidemic and to prepare robotics for assisting with future epidemics. The robotics community cannot provide robots without understanding the needs and engineering mistakes or mismatches will both be financially costly and delay the delivery of effective solutions. This is a rare opportunity to work with responders as they plan for a deployment of more than 3,000 troops plus Centers for Disease Control workers, and a possibly greater number of volunteers through non-governmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders. The project outcomes will allow robotics companies to confidently pre-position/re-position products and to incorporate the findings into R&D investment strategies. The categorization of problems will guide academia in future research and to use as motivating class projects. The effective use of robots will provide responders with tools for the short term and will provide achievable expectations of robotics technology in general. There is no comprehensive statement of the missions that robots can be used for during a medical event and general mission descriptions (e.g. we need a robot to transport bodies) do not capture the design constraints on a robot. Prior work has shown that not understanding the operational envelope, work domain, and culture results in overly expensive robots that cannot be adopted. Robotics has not been considered by health professionals for the entire space of a medical event (hospitals, field medicine, logistics, security from riots), nor has the disaster or medical robotics communities been engaged with epidemics. This project will provide the fundamental understanding of how robots can be used for medical disasters and will design a formal process for projecting robotics requirements. It will benefit safety security and rescue robotics by expanding research from meteorological, geological, and man-made disasters to medical disasters and surgical robotics and telerobotics by pushing the boundaries of how robots are used for biosafety event.