Jihong Zhu, Michael Gienger, Giovanni Franzese, Jens Kober, "Do You Need a Hand? – An Interactive Robotic Dressing Assistance Scheme", IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2024.

Developing physically assistive robots capable of dressing assistance has the potential to significantly improve the lives of the elderly and disabled population. However, most robotics dressing strategies used a single robot only, which greatly limited the performance of the dressing assistance. In fact, both arms are usually required when healthcare professionals perform the task. Inspired by them, we propose a bimanual cooperative scheme for robotic dressing assistance. In the scheme, an inter- active robot joins hands with the human thus supports/guides the human in the dressing process, while the dressing robot performs the dressing task. We identify a key feature that affects the dressing action and propose an optimal strategy for the interactive robot using the feature. A dressing coordinate based on the posture of the arm is defined to better encode the dressing policy. We validate the interactive dressing scheme with extensive experiments and also an ablation study.