This paper presents a novel concept to support physically impaired humans in daily object manipulation tasks with a robot. Given a user's manipulation sequence, we propose a predictive model that uniquely casts the user's sequential behavior as well as a robot support intervention into a hierarchical multi-objective optimization problem. A major contribution is the prediction formulation, which allows to consider several different future paths concurrently. The second contribution is the encoding of a general notion of constancy constraints, which allows to consider dependencies between consecutive or far apart keyframes (in time or space) of a sequential task. We perform numerical studies, simulations and robot experiments to analyse and evaluate the proposed method in several table top tasks where a robot supports impaired users by predicting their posture and proactively re-arranging objects.

翻译：本文提出了一种新颖的概念，旨在通过机器人辅助身体障碍者在日常物体操作任务中提供支持。针对用户的操作序列，我们构建了一个预测模型，该模型独特地将用户的序列行为以及机器人的辅助干预转化为层次化多目标优化问题。主要贡献在于预测公式的设计，使得能够同时考虑多个不同的未来路径。第二个贡献是对一般性恒常性约束的编码，从而能够考虑序列任务中连续或相隔较远的关键帧（在时间或空间上）之间的依赖关系。我们通过数值研究、仿真实验及机器人实验，在多个桌面任务中分析和评估了所提方法，其中机器人通过预测用户姿势并主动重新排列物体来为障碍者提供支持。