PR2: Replacing Lost Abilities with a Robot

posted on Sep 09 by Brian in the Disability News, Technology category

Medical science is working hard researching treatments and cures. Robotics science is also working hard to improve the lives of those with disabilities, producing home assistants like the PR2. Currently being beta tested by Henry Evans, a quadriplegic who became partially paralyzed 10 years ago after a stroke, PR2 (or, “Personal Robot 2”) is a creation from the private research lab Willow Garage, with a special user interface engineered at Willow Garage and the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech.

“We’re showing how robots could give back independence to people in that situation,” says Steve Cousins, CEO of Willow Garage. PR2, for instance, can navigate a home and has the dexterity to grasp objects. Encouraged by the performance, Cousins hopes to recruit more people who could benefit from robotic assistance to join the research project.

As robotics explores the small scale personal challenges facing individuals with disabilities, the concepts are being prepared to expand into a larger scale such as in factories to enable humans and robots to cooperate more closely on complex manufacturing tasks. Much still needs to be explored and researched, however, so people like Henry Evans are helping even as they themselves are helped.

Evans recently shaved himself for the first time in his 10 years of paralysis, with help from PR2. The mechanical helper still needs supervision from its engineers –-it has a rudimentary awareness and only just recently been given the ability to figure out for itself how to best grasp an object– but Evans is grateful for even just that.

Using his head to move the cursor on the robot’s interface and clicking a button with his one movable finger, Evans accomplishes simple tasks that others take for granted, like maneuvering the PR2′s arm to where he can shave, moving objects in another room, putting things into drawers, or even just scratch his face!

“You don’t need everything to be autonomous,” says Rajiv Dubey, a professor in the Rehabilitation Robotics group at the University of South Florida. “You have a human in the loop, and you can combine that person’s cognitive abilities with the robot’s computational ones.”

Tell us what you think. Would you want a robot in your home?