A Single-Switch Scanning Interface for Robot Control by Quadriplegics

Robotic technology has promised considerable help to people with severe motor and communicative disabilities. However, due to motor and speech impairments these people are not able to handle commercial products with common interfaces for moving a particular robotic device. Scanning interfaces are used extensively for people with severe impairments and to this end, we present in this paper, a single-switch web-based scanning application for tablets for controlling a robotic arm only by controlling the 3D position of its end-effector. We present a comparison of our user interface with an already, proposed similar solution [4] which controls the robotic arm by controlling all the joints of the robotic arm independently. As a preliminary study, we developed both of these user interfaces and we conducted experiments with fully able subjects so as to evaluate which human-robot interface is better in terms of supporting the easiest and the most straightforward communication between robots and a motorimpaired individual.