A team led by researchers from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science received the Outstanding Paper Award at the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) conference in June.
The paper is called “FEAST: A Flexible Mealtime Assistance System Towards In-the-Wild Personalization,” and it’s the latest award-winning research from roboticists in Cornell’s EmPRISE Lab..
FEAST furthers one of the lab’s primary aims – to bring safe, useful, and adaptive robotics out of the lab and into people’s homes. FEAST is a robotic system that enables care recipients with mobility challenges to personalize mealtime feeding on the fly and in real time. The system was developed in collaboration with two independent researchers with mobility challenges and informed by a formative study with a diverse group of care recipients.
FEAST was also a finalist for RSS’s Outstanding Systems Paper Award.
Paper authors are: Rajat Kumar Jenamani, a doctoral student in the field of computer science and lead author; Tom Silver, Ben Dodson, Shiqin Tong, Anthony Song, Ziang Liu, all of Cornell; Yuting Yang of the University of Michigan; Benjamin Howe and Aimee Whitneck, both independent researchers, and Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee, assistant professor of computer science.
In addition to FEAST, a separate paper on robot-assisted feeding from the EmPRISE lab was recognized at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) in May. “To Ask or Not To Ask: Human-in-the-loop Contextual Bandits with Applications in Robot-Assisted Feeding” was a finalist for the conference’s Best Paper Award and Best Human Robot Interaction Paper Award.