Medical Robots: Advancing Health Care Research
When Charlie Kemp was a graduate student, he became interested in how wearable computing could be used to teach robots to behave intelligently. Along with another colleague, Dr. Kemp created the first system to use a shoe-mounted camera to perform gait analysis, obstacle detection, and context recognition. What followed was a deep interest in intelligent systems that perceive and act within human environments.
Kemp continued to contribute to robotics research especially robot manipulation focusing on mobile manipulation in built-for-human environments.
Now as an assistant professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Dr. Kemp’s research focuses on healthcare robotics with an emphasis on autonomous robot manipulation and human-robot interaction. He also serves as Director of the Center for Healthcare Robotics in the Health Systems Institute. The Health Systems Institute was created in 2005 as a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary initiative based at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
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An important characteristic of these robots is the "assistance" ability they can bring to humans in performing various physical tasks. Dr. Kemp’s work focuses on the development of intelligent robots with autonomous capabilities for healthcare. Dr. Kemp proposed and is currently leading a project involving an assistive robot that fetches everyday objects by reaching toward a subject and naturally cueing him or her to hand it the object. This project models prior work where Dr. Kemp collaborated on a robotics application that uses autonomous manipulation to assist a human sitting in a chair to place everyday objects on a shelf. The capability to do autonomous manipulation is key to many new emerging robotic applications in healthcare, construction, underwater, security, and even space.