Dexter Duckworth’s research while affiliated with Mississippi State University and other places

Therabot is an assistive-robotic therapy system designed to provide support during counseling sessions and home therapy practice to patients diagnosed with conditions associated with trauma. Studies were conducted to determine desired features of potential end-users of the system, such as clinicians, with feedback from past survivors of trauma to guide the participatory design process. The results from a survey of 1,045 respondents revealed a preferred form factor of a floppy-eared dog with coloring similar to that of a beagle. The most requested features were that the robot be of a size that would be comfortable to fit in a person's lap and a covering that was soft, durable, and had multiple textures.

Therabot™ is an assistive-robotic therapy system designed to provide support during counseling sessions and home therapy practice to patients diagnosed with conditions associated with trauma. It has the form factor of a floppy-eared dog with coloring similar to that of a beagle, and comfortably fits in a person's lap.

As robotic systems become more sophisticated, they are increasingly called upon to accompany humans in high-stress environments. This research was conducted to support the integration of robotic systems into tactical teams operating in challenging and stressful environments. Robotic systems used to assist tactical teams will need to support some form of autonomy; these systems must be capable of providing operators supervisory control in cases of unpredictable real-time events. An evaluation of the relative effectiveness of three different methods of supervisory control of an autonomously operated mobile robot system was conducted: (1) hand gestures using a Microsoft Kinect, (2) an interactive Android application on a hand-held mobile device, and (3) verbal commands issued through a headset. These methods of supervisory control were compared to a teleoperated robot using a gamepad controller. The results from this pilot study determined that the touchscreen device was the easiest interface to use to override the robot's next intended movement (L2(3,23)=11.413, p=.003, d=1.58) and was considered the easiest interface to use overall (L2(3,23)=8.078, p=.044, d=.93). The results also indicate that the touchscreen device provided the most enjoyable, satisfying, and engaging interface of the four user interfaces evaluated.

This paper reports on lessons learned in sensor placement and search strategies for nuclear forensics from a 2013 field exercise. Nuclear forensics, where a radiological source is located, has been the subject of theoretical research but only one reported instance with an actual robot (Fukushima). The field exercise specifically focused on source localization where a teleoperated Packbot 510 UGV Radiac AN/UDR-14 dosimeter was used to find a 1.48 GigaBecquerel cesium-137 source placed in a partially collapsed building. The operators were able to quickly find the correct room but not the source, spending 30 minutes searching a 6 by 6 m space due to inconsistent measurements. A detailed analysis of the logged data shows that the readings were more reliable and suitable for an autonomous search algorithm when the robot was driven backwards. This counter-intuitive result appears due to unfavorable sensor placement. However, given that all robots have limited areas that sensors can be mounted on and have metal parts, it may be unrealistic to focus on optimizing radiological sensor placement on non-holonomic platforms. Instead, this paper recommends research in autonomous localization strategies that will compensate for inevitable imperfect readings.