Cadida Software will shortly be starting a new research project together with Offenburg University. The project will investigate the extent to which artificial intelligence and a robotic arm can support people with full-body paralysis and people with locked-in syndrome in everyday life.
The ultimate aim of the research is to enable activities of daily living and to improve the patients' quality of life and, of course, also to relieve the burden on nursing staff.
People with full-body paralysis can no longer do such simple things as picking up a glass of water and drinking from it. In many cases, the patients' speech is also impaired, so voice control of devices is not possible. The robotic arm should therefore be able to carry out such actions with unknown objects using eye control. The plan is an assistance system consisting of an AI, eye-tracking control of the wheelchair, a gripper arm on the wheelchair and speech output.
As the first step towards realising this idea, the research and development team is tackling the most difficult part. The aim is to develop a component that works with and can control any standard wheelchair, any robotic arm and any eye-tracking glasses. We call this component HIRAC (Hardware Independent Robotic Assistance Controller).
HIRAC will be a hardware-independent middleware for solving robotic gripping tasks. In addition to use in the social sector, use in industry is also conceivable. The heart of the middleware will be an AI that brings together and controls eye control, image processing, sensor feedback and object manipulation.
Text: Yaroslava
Image: AI: DALL·E 2023
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