Did you know that 1 million adults in the USA need someone to help them eat?
Researchers at the University of Washington are working on a robotic system that can help make it easier. The robot can identify different foods on a plate and learn how to use a fork and pick up and deliver a bite to a person`s mouth.
The results of the study were published in IEE Robotics and Automation Letters, while the rest of the results will be presented on March 13 at the ACM/IEEE Internation Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in South Korea.
“Being dependent on a caregiver to feed every bite every day takes away a person’s sense of independence.”, explains the corresponding author Siddhartha Srinivasa, who is a Boeing Endowed Professor in the UW`s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
He added that their goal with the project was to give people more control over their lives. What researchers want to do is create an autonomous feeding system that would be attached to people`s wheelchairs and feed them based on their eating wishes.
“When we started the project we realized: There are so many ways that people can eat a piece of food depending on its size, shape or consistency. How do we start?”, commented coauthor Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee, a postdoctoral research associate in the Allen School. Bhattacharjee added that they set up an experiment to see how humans eat common foods like grapes, for example.
How did it work?
The researchers arranged plates with different types of food with different consistency – from hard carrots to soft bananas. Also, there were foods like tomatoes and grapes, which have tough skin and soft fillings. So, what did the team do next? They gave volunteers a fork and asked them to pick up different pieces of food and feed them to a mannequin. The fork contained a sensor measuring how much force people use when they picked up food.
“People seemed to use different strategies not just based on the size and shape of the food but also how hard or soft it is. But do we actually need to do that?”, asked Bhattacharjee.
“We decided to do an experiment with the robot where we had it skewer food until the fork reached a certain depth inside, regardless of the type of food.”, she added.
The advantage of the robot was that it used the same force-and-skewering strategy to try to pick up all the pieces of food, regardless of consistency.
Read more about the experiment in the press release, published by the researcher`s team here.