Personalizing Assistive Robots: A Reconfigurable and Adaptable Shared-autonomy Framework and its Applications.

The quality of life of people with motor impairments, often caused by spinal cord injuries, is severely reduced. Assistive robotic devices offer an opportunity to improve the quality of life of these people and help them regain a certain level of independence. A completely autonomous solution is often not desired since people have a need to keep their remaining autonomy or recover some of their lost autonomy, while feeling in control as much as possible. Therefore, robotic assistive solutions that share the autonomy between human and computer have been proposed. These solutions assist by granting the users only partial control over the robot.