Exercise Games with Baxter

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Research Overview

Natural Embodied Touch

Finger-Surface Contact Mechanics in Diverse Moisture Conditions

Perceptual Integration of Contact Force Components During Fingertip Sliding

Material Intelligence of Animal Whiskers

Artificial Touch Sensing and Processing

Giving Touch to Soft Robot Fingertips Using Vision, Audio and Machine Learning

Capturing and Recognizing Multimodal Surface Interactions

Multimodal Puncture Detection for Urgent Percutaneous Therapies

Haptic Actuation

Quantifying the Quality of Haptic Interfaces

Shape-Changing Haptic Interfaces

Generating Clear Vibrotactile Cues with Magnets Embedded in a Soft Finger Sheath

Salient Full-Fingertip Haptic Feedback Enabled by Wearable Electrohydraulic Actuation

Cutaneous Electrohydraulic (CUTE) Wearable Devices for Pleasant Broad-Bandwidth Haptic Cues

Modeling Finger-Touchscreen Contact during Electrovibration

Perception of Ultrasonic Friction Pulses

CAPT Motor: A Two-Phase Ironless Motor Structure

Immersive Teleoperation

4D Intraoperative Surgical Perception: Anatomical Shape Reconstruction from Multiple Viewpoints

Visual-Inertial Force Estimation in Robotic Surgery

Enhancing Robotic Surgical Training

AiroTouch: Naturalistic Vibrotactile Feedback for Large-Scale Telerobotic Assembly

Optimization-Based Whole-Arm Teleoperation for Natural Human-Robot Interaction

Human-Robot Interaction

Enhancing HRI through Responsive Multimodal Feedback

Haptic Empathetic Robot Animal (HERA)

How does HuggieBot compare to a human hugging partner?

HuggieBot: Evolution of an Interactive Hugging Robot with Visual and Haptic Perception

Human Movement

Reconstructing Sign-Language Movements from Images and Bioimpedance Measurements

Advancing Gait-Retraining Techniques

Multimodal Sensing Reveals the Dynamics of Time-Constrained Teamwork

Previous HI Projects

Finger-Surface Contact Mechanics in Diverse Moisture Conditions

Computational Modeling of Finger-Surface Contact

Perceptual Integration of Contact Force Components During Tactile Stimulation

Dynamic Models and Wearable Tactile Devices for the Fingertips

Novel Designs and Rendering Algorithms for Fingertip Haptic Devices

Dimensional Reduction from 3D to 1D for Realistic Vibration Rendering

Prendo: Analyzing Human Grasping Strategies for Visually Occluded Objects

Learning Upper-Limb Exercises from Demonstrations

Minimally Invasive Surgical Training with Multimodal Feedback and Automatic Skill Evaluation

Efficient Large-Area Tactile Sensing for Robot Skin

Haptic Feedback and Autonomous Reflexes for Upper-limb Prostheses

Gait Retraining

Modeling Hand Deformations During Contact

Intraoperative AR Assistance for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

Immersive VR for Phantom Limb Pain

Visual and Haptic Perception of Real Surfaces

Haptipedia

Gait Propulsion Trainer

TouchTable: A Musical Interface with Haptic Feedback for DJs

Exercise Games with Baxter

Intuitive Social-Physical Robots for Exercise

How Should Robots Hug?

Hierarchical Structure for Learning from Demonstration

Fabrication of HuggieBot 2.0: A More Huggable Robot

Learning Haptic Adjectives from Tactile Data

Feeling With Your Eyes: Visual-Haptic Surface Interaction

S-BAN

General Tactile Sensor Model

Insight: a Haptic Sensor Powered by Vision and Machine Learning

Haptic Intelligence Members Publications

Exercise Games with Baxter

Exercisebaxter — A user playing the exercise games with Max, our Baxter robot. The six games on the left involve physical interaction between the user and Max, whereas Flamenco and Roboga require motion but no contact.

Improvements in healthcare have led to an increase in human life expectancy. Members of this aging population want to stay healthy and active, but many forms of exercise and physical therapy are expensive, boring, or inefficient. Past research has shown that well-designed robots can play a vital role in motivating users to perform regular exercise and physical therapy.

To discover how people respond to physical exercise interactions with a robot, we have developed eight human-robot exercise games for Max, our Baxter Research Robot (developed by Rethink Robotics): six of these games involve some form of physical contact with the robot, and two involve performing movements as directed by the robot, which has been the standard approach in prior work. These games were developed with the input and guidance of experts in game design, therapy and rehabilitation [], as well as through extensive pilot testing []. The viability of the games was then formally evaluated in a user study conducted at the Rehabilitation Robotics Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania.

Our subject group included 20 younger and 20 older adult users. Participants of both age groups were willing to enter Baxter's workspace and physically interact with the robot through all of these games []. Additionally, participating in the experiment caused a significant increase in user trust and confidence in Baxter []. Careful analysis of the human-robot interactions that occurred throughout the study provided us with detailed feedback on the usability of all of the games. These results support the potential use of bimanual humanoid robots for social-physical interaction in exercise and will help guide our ongoing efforts in this research domain.

Members

Haptic Intelligence

Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Director

Haptic Intelligence

Mayumi Mohan

Research Scientist

Publications

Haptic Intelligence Article Exercising with Baxter: Preliminary Support for Assistive Social-Physical Human-Robot Interaction Fitter, N. T., Mohan, M., Kuchenbecker, K. J., Johnson, M. J. Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, 17:1-22, February 2020 (Published)

Abstract ›

Background: The worldwide population of older adults will soon exceed the capacity of assisted living facilities. Accordingly, we aim to understand whether appropriately designed robots could help older adults stay active at home. Methods: Building on related literature as well as guidance from experts in game design, rehabilitation, and physical and occupational therapy, we developed eight human-robot exercise games for the Baxter Research Robot, six of which involve physical human-robot contact. After extensive iteration, these games were tested in an exploratory user study including 20 younger adult and 20 older adult users. Results: Only socially and physically interactive games fell in the highest ranges for pleasantness, enjoyment, engagement, cognitive challenge, and energy level. Our games successfully spanned three different physical, cognitive, and temporal challenge levels. User trust and confidence in Baxter increased significantly between pre- and post-study assessments. Older adults experienced higher exercise, energy, and engagement levels than younger adults, and women rated the robot more highly than men on several survey questions. Conclusions: The results indicate that social-physical exercise with a robot is more pleasant, enjoyable, engaging, cognitively challenging, and energetic than similar interactions that lack physical touch. In addition to this main finding, researchers working in similar areas can build on our design practices, our open-source resources, and the age-group and gender differences that we found.

DOI BibTeX

Haptic Intelligence Miscellaneous Exercising with Baxter: Design and Evaluation of Assistive Social-Physical Human-Robot Interaction Fitter, N. T., Mohan, M., Kuchenbecker, K. J., Johnson, M. J. Workshop paper (6 pages) presented at the HRI Workshop on Personal Robots for Exercising and Coaching, Chicago, USA, March 2018 (Published)

Abstract ›

The worldwide population of older adults is steadily increasing and will soon exceed the capacity of assisted living facilities. Accordingly, we aim to understand whether appropriately designed robots could help older adults stay active and engaged while living at home. We developed eight human-robot exercise games for the Baxter Research Robot with the guidance of experts in game design, therapy, and rehabilitation. After extensive iteration, these games were employed in a user study that tested their viability with 20 younger and 20 older adult users. All participants were willing to enter Baxter’s workspace and physically interact with the robot. User trust and confidence in Baxter increased significantly between pre- and post-experiment assessments, and one individual from the target user population supplied us with abundant positive feedback about her experience. The preliminary results presented in this paper indicate potential for the use of two-armed human-scale robots for social-physical exercise interaction.

URL BibTeX

Haptic Intelligence Miscellaneous Physically Interactive Exercise Games with a Baxter Robot Fitter, N. T., Kuchenbecker, K. J. Hands-on demonstration presented at the IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC), Munich, Germany, June 2017 (Published) BibTeX

Haptic Intelligence Miscellaneous Hand-Clapping Games with a Baxter Robot Fitter, N. T., Kuchenbecker, K. J. Hands-on demonstration presented at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Vienna, Austria, March 2017 (Published)

Abstract ›

Robots that work alongside humans might be more effective if they could forge a strong social bond with their human partners. Hand-clapping games and other forms of rhythmic social-physical interaction may foster human-robot teamwork, but the design of such interactions has scarcely been explored. At the HRI 2017 conference, we will showcase several such interactions taken from our recent work with the Rethink Robotics Baxter Research Robot, including tempo-matching, Simon says, and Pat-a-cake-like games. We believe conference attendees will be both entertained and intrigued by this novel demonstration of social-physical HRI.

BibTeX

Haptic Intelligence Miscellaneous Designing Human-Robot Exercise Games for Baxter Fitter, N. T., Hawkes, D. T., Johnson, M. J., Kuchenbecker, K. J. Daejeon, South Korea, October 2016, Late-breaking results report presented at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (Published) BibTeX