Rehabilitation Robotics

In recent years, especially in the last two decades, the worldwide healthcare community showed a high interest on rehabilitation robotic systems that can partially overtake tasks that usually are carried out by care-giving personnel. The growing interest in this field of robotics is due to the fact that in a large number of healthcare areas there is a lack of trained personnel. Parallel to this, the number of elderly and persons with disabilities is increasing every year.

Rehabilitation robotic systems are classified into two categories physical therapy and training robots and robotic aids for people with disabilities. The goal of therapy robots is to help patients recover from different forms of accidents and maladies. On the other hand, assistive robots are there mainly to support persons with disabilities in Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and professional life. Assistive robots are further classified depending on the type of target users, namely fix manipulation aids, wheelchair-mounted manipulator systems, mobile autonomous and wheelchair navigation platforms, walking assistants and cognitive aids.

Mobile manipulation with the FRIEND robot

A sample of my brainwaves taken within the FRIEND project

Related publications

S.M. Grigorescu, T. Lueth, C. Fragkopoulos, M. Cyriacks and A. Graeser "A BCI Controlled Robotic Assistant for Quadriplegic People in Domestic and Professional Life", ROBOTICA, Cambridge University Press, UK, 2011.

S.M. Grigorescu and C. Pozna "Towards a Stable Robotic Object Manipulation through 2D-3D Features Tracking", International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, InTech, vol. 10, no. 200, pp. 1-8, 2013.

S.M. Grigorescu, D. Pangercic and M. Beetz "2D-3D Collaborative Tracking (23CT): Towards Stable Robotic Manipulation", Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE-RSJ International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems IROS, Workshop on Active Semantic Perception, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, October 7-12, 2012.

T.T. Cocias, F. Moldoveanu and S.M. Grigorescu "Generic Fitted Shapes (GFS): Volumetric Object Segmentation in Service Robotics", Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Elsevier, Netherlands, 2013.

Tschakarow, R., Grigorescu, S.M., Graeser, A. "FRIEND - a Dependable Semiautonomous Rehabilitation Robot", Proceedings of the Joint 41th International Symposium on Robotics and 6th German Conference on Robotics, pp. 327-378, Munich, Germany, June 07-09, 2010.

Heyer, T., Grigorescu, S.M., Graeser, A. "Camera Calibration for Reliable Object Manipulation in Care-providing System FRIEND", Proceedings of the Joint 41th International Symposium on Robotics and 6th German Conference on Robotics, pp. 446-451, Munich, Germany, June 07-09, 2010.

Grigorescu, S.M., Ristic-Durrant, D., Graeser, A. "RObust machine VIsion for Service robotic system FRIEND", Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE-RSJ International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems IROS, St. Louis, USA, October 10-15, Tome II, pp. 3574-3581, ISBN 978-1-4244-3803-7, DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2009.5354596, 2009.

Grigorescu, S.M., Ristic-Durrant, D. "Robust Extraction of Object Features in the System FRIEND II", Methods and Applications in Automation, Shaker Verlag, Series 1, No. 2, pp. 97-107, ISBN 978-3-8322-7666-9, ISSN 1861-5457, 2008.