CMU Robot Puts on Shirts One Sleeve at a Time

Data from the National Center for Health Statistics reveals that 92% of nursing facility residents and at-home care patients require assistance with dressing, a daily activity easily taken for granted by many. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute (RI) are working toward a future where robots can help. "Remarkably, existing endeavors in robot-assisted dressing have primarily assumed dressing with a limited range of arm poses and with a single fixed garment, like a hospital gown," said Yufei Wang, an RI Ph.D. candidate working on a robot-assisted dressing system. "Developing a general system to address the diverse range of everyday clothing and varying motor function capabilities is our overarching objective. We also want to extend the system to individuals with different levels of constrained arm movement." The robot-assisted dressing system leverages the capabilities of artificial intelligence to accommodate various human body shapes, arm poses and clothing selections. The team's research used reinforcement learning - rewards for accomplishing certain tasks - to achieve their general dressing system.