Applications

Assistive Robotics

Assistive robotics is the branch of robotics devoted to helping people with disabilities, injuries, or age-related limitations perform daily activities, encompassing wheelchair-mounted manipulators, robot-assisted feeding and dressing, exoskeletons for mobility, and socially assistive robots for therapy and companionship. Research emphasizes safety in close physical contact, personalization to individual users' bodies and preferences, and shared-control interfaces that blend user intent with robot autonomy.

Why it matters for physical AI

Care tasks are intimate, contact-rich, and unforgiving of errors, concentrating the hardest problems in safe physical human-robot interaction while demographic aging makes the application economically urgent.