Cadida Software will soon start a new research project together with the University of Applied Sciences Offenburg. The project will investigate the extent to which artificial intelligence and a robotic arm can support persons with total body paralysis and persons with locked-in syndrome in everyday life.
The ultimate goal of the research is to enable everyday activities and increase the quality of life of patients and, of course, to relieve caregivers.
Such simple things as taking a glass of water and drinking from it are no longer possible for people with total body paralysis. In many cases, speech is also impaired in patients and thus voice control of the devices is not possible. Therefore, the robotic arm should be able to perform such actions with unknown objects through eye control. An assistance system is planned, which consists of an AI, the eye tracking control of the wheelchair, a gripper arm on the wheelchair and a speech output.
In the first step towards realizing this idea, the research and development team is dealing with the most difficult part. It is to develop a component that can work with and control any commercially available wheelchair, robotic arm and eye-tracking glasses. We call this component HIRAC (Hardware Independent Robotic Assistance Controller).
HIRAC will be a hardware independent middleware that can be used to solve robot gripping tasks. In addition to its use in the social sector, its use in industry is also conceivable. At the heart of the middleware will be an AI that combines and controls eye control, image processing, sensor feedback and object manipulation.
Text: Yaroslava
Picture: AI: DALL·E 2023
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