Robots in educational and vocational applications for the severely physically disabled

An approach to controlling robots has been developed which forms the basis of an interactive robotic workstation for use in educational and vocational settings by severely physically disabled individuals. In such settings, the intelligence of the disabled person is supplemented with the manipulative power of a robot in order to carry out activities such as block play, cooking, science experiments, and mixed manual/robot assembly and inspection. This approach is in sharp contrast with mainstream robotics research and practice where the emphasis is on removing the human involvement in manual activities