  Assistive robots enable people with disabilities to conduct everyday tasks on
their own. However, these tasks can be complex, containing both coarse reaching
motions and fine-grained manipulation. For example, when eating, not only does
one need to move to the correct food item, but they must also precisely
manipulate the food in different ways (e.g., cutting, stabbing, scooping).
Shared autonomy methods make robot teleoperation safer and more precise by
arbitrating user inputs with robot controls. However, these works have focused
mainly on the high-level task of reaching a goal from a discrete set, while
largely ignoring manipulation of objects at that goal. Meanwhile,
dimensionality reduction techniques for teleoperation map useful
high-dimensional robot actions into an intuitive low-dimensional controller,
but it is unclear if these methods can achieve the requisite precision for
tasks like eating. Our insight is that---by combining intuitive embeddings from
learned latent actions with robotic assistance from shared autonomy---we can
enable precise assistive manipulation. In this work, we adopt learned latent
actions for shared autonomy by proposing a new model structure that changes the
meaning of the human's input based on the robot's confidence of the goal. We
show convergence bounds on the robot's distance to the most likely goal, and
develop a training procedure to learn a controller that is able to move between
goals even in the presence of shared autonomy. We evaluate our method in
simulations and an eating user study. See videos of our experiments here:
https://youtu.be/7BouKojzVyk

Robotics