Towards Online Robot Interaction Adaptation to Human Upper-limb Mobility Impairments in Return-to-Work Scenarios

Abstract

Work environments are often inadequate and lack inclusivity for individuals with upper-body disabilities. This paper presents a novel online framework for adaptive human-robot interaction (HRI) that accommodates users' arm mobility impairments, ultimately aiming to promote active work participation. Unlike traditional human-robot collaboration approaches that assume able-bodied users, our method integrates a mobility model for specific joint limitations into a hierarchical optimal controller. This allows the robot to generate reactive, mobility-aware behaviour online and guides the user's impaired limb to exploit residual functional mobility. The framework was tested in handover tasks involving different upper-limb mobility impairments (i.e., emulated elbow and shoulder arthritis, and wrist blockage), under both standing and seated configurations with task constraints using a mobile manipulator, and complemented by quantitative and qualitative comparisons with state-of-the-art ergonomic HRI approaches. Preliminary results indicated that the framework can personalise the interaction to fit within the user's impaired range of motion and encourage joint usage based on the severity of their functional limitations.