Various foods handling movement of chopstick-equipped meal assistant robot and there evaluation

Abstract

Recently, the development of daily life support or assistant robots have come into demand as a result of the impact of the decreasing birthrate and increasing the aging population. We have developed a new meal assistant robot for use by disabled or elderly persons who cannot eat unassisted. In addition, we use chopsticks as the meal tool because chopsticks are capable of various movements and are familiar to people in Asian countries. In the present paper, the basic system of this robot is introduced. In addition, various food handling movements are investigated, and an evaluation experiment is performed in order to investigate the feasibility of the newly developed robot. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.