More than one billion people in the world are estimated to experience significant motor impairments. These affect people's ability to independently conduct activities of daily living, including ambulating, eating, dressing, personal hygiene, and more. Robots have the potential to assist people with motor impairments due to their ability to move around human environments and physically interact with objects and people. The field of physically assistive robotics has a long history; however, only recently robots have become feasible in terms of their capabilities, safety, and marketability, to assist people not just in controlled care environments but in dynamic environments in people's homes. The first few deployments of robots in homes in recent years have revealed many new challenges for different sub-fields of robotics, reinforcing the need to collaborate with other disciplines and, in particular, consider basic human psychological needs.

In this Dagstuhl Seminar, we will engage in discussions of three topics which are focused around the challenge of bringing physically assistive robots into people’s homes. These three topics are described below:

• How to work with people with motor impairments to deploy assistive robots in their homes? To discuss this topic, we will cover aspects related to recruitment strategies to engage the disabled community in robotics research and understanding how to prioritize home use-cases for physically assistive robots.
• How to conduct studies and design for physically assistive robots to be used in a home environment? To discuss this topic, we will engage in discussions around the design and understanding of the interaction modalities in a home environment, as well as discussing and identifying valid and robust metrics and study physically assistive robots in homes.
• How to build robots that are robust, safe, and reliable to function in homes? To address this topic, we will engage in discussions around achieving robustness via shared autonomy, and creating end-to-end robot systems for the home.

In this seminar, we aim to gather experts across those disciplines related to physically assistive robotics to promote a shared understanding of the state of the art on physically assistive robotics in the home, and to establish cross-collaborations. Participants of this seminar will be researchers in the field of physically assistive robotics and industries that develop/sell assistive robotic technology. In addition, we aim to involve stakeholders (e.g., users, occupational therapists) who (potentially) use a physically assistive robot in their life. This well-rounded audience will enable further conversations, collaborations, and create a shared vision on physically assistive robotics in the home.

We expect this Dagstuhl Seminar to have outcomes that support research and development in the area of physically assistive robotics, including: documentation of guidelines on how to include the disabled community and other stakeholders in research; highlights and insights about how different disciplines can come together to work on physically assistive robotics; clear open questions regarding topics that still need to be explored in this field in the future; establishment of collaborations between researchers, community, and industry.

Activities across the schedule include research, community, and industry participants.

Creative Commons BY 4.0

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira, Maya Cakmak, Yiannis Demiris, and Jens Gerken