About one million adults in the USA need someone to help them eat. Researchers at the University of Washington are working on a robotic system that can help make it easier. After identifying different food on a plate, the robot can decide how to use a fork to pick up and deliver the desired bite to a person's mouth.
"Being dependent on a caregiver to feed every bite every day takes away a person's sense of independence," said the researcher." Our goal with this project is to give people a bit more control over their lives. The idea was to develop a feeding system that would be attached to wheelchairs and feed people whatever they wanted to eat."
" When we started the project, we realized there are so many ways that people can eat a piece of food depending on its size, shape or consistency (坚实度)," said the researcher," So we set up an experiment to see how humans eat common foods."
The researchers arranged plates with about a dozen different kinds of food, ranging in consistency from hard carrots to soft bananas. Then the team gave volunteers a fork and asked them to pick up different pieces of food and feed them to a model. The fork contained a sensor to measure how much force people used when they picked up food.
To design a feeding strategy that changes based on the food item, the researchers combined two different algorithms (算法). First they used an object-detection algorithm called Retina Net, which scans the plate, identifies the types of food on it and places a frame around each item. Then they developed SPNet, an algorithm that examines the type of food in a specific frame and tells the robot the best way to pick up the food.
The team is currently working with the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology to get advice from caregivers and patients on how to improve the system to meet people's need.
