Multimodal User Supervised Interface and Intelligent Control (MUSIIC) 
for Assistive Robots

Zunaid Kazi, Marcos Salganicoff, Matthew Beitler,
Shoupu Chen, Daniel Chester and Richard Foulds
Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories
Alfred I. duPont Institute/University of Delaware
Wilmington, Delaware USA

Abstract

This paper reports on a method and system which integrates human-computer interaction with 
reactive planning to operate a telerobot for use as an assistive device. The system is intended to 
meet the needs of individuals with physical disabilities and operate in an unstructured environ
ment, rather than in a structured workcell. This allows the user considerable freedom and flexibil
ity in terms of control and operating ease. We describe a novel approach for an intelligent 
assistive telerobotic system for such an environment: speech-deictic gesture control integrated 
with a knowledge-driven reactive planner and a stereo-vision system which builds a superquadric 
shape representation of the scene.