Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

On the Integration of Adaptive and Interactive Robotic Smart Spaces

© 2015 Mauro Dragone et al.. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)Enabling robots to seamlessly operate as part of smart spaces is an important and extended challenge for robotics R&D and a key enabler for a range of advanced robotic applications, such as AmbientAssisted Living (AAL) and home automation. The integration of these technologies is currently being pursued from two largely distinct view-points: On the one hand, people-centred initiatives focus on improving the user’s acceptance by tackling human-robot interaction (HRI) issues, often adopting a social robotic approach, and by giving to the designer and - in a limited degree – to the final user(s), control on personalization and product customisation features. On the other hand, technologically-driven initiatives are building impersonal but intelligent systems that are able to pro-actively and autonomously adapt their operations to fit changing requirements and evolving users’ needs,but which largely ignore and do not leverage human-robot interaction and may thus lead to poor user experience and user acceptance. In order to inform the development of a new generation of smart robotic spaces, this paper analyses and compares different research strands with a view to proposing possible integrated solutions with both advanced HRI and online adaptation capabilities.Peer reviewe

Supporting active and healthy aging with advanced robotics integrated in smart environment

The technological advances in the robotic and ICT fields represent an effective solution to address specific societal problems to support ageing and independent life. One of the key factors for these technologies is the integration of service robotics for optimising social services and improving quality of life of the elderly population. This chapter aims to underline the barriers of the state of the art, furthermore the authors present their concrete experiences to overcome these barriers gained at the RoboTown Living Lab of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna within past and current projects. They analyse and discuss the results in order to give recommendations based on their experiences. Furthermore, this work highlights the trend of development from stand-alone solutions to cloud computing architecture, describing the future research directions

User-centered design of a dynamic-autonomy remote interaction concept for manipulation-capable robots to assist elderly people in the home

In this article, we describe the development of a human-robot interaction concept for service robots to assist elderly people in the home with physical tasks. Our approach is based on the insight that robots are not yet able to handle all tasks autonomously with sufficient reliability in the complex and heterogeneous environments of private homes. We therefore employ remote human operators to assist on tasks a robot cannot handle completely autonomously. Our development methodology was user-centric and iterative, with six user studies carried out at various stages involving a total of 241 participants. The concept is under implementation on the Care-O-bot 3 robotic platform. The main contributions of this article are (1) the results of a survey in form of a ranking of the demands of elderly people and informal caregivers for a range of 25 robot services, (2) the results of an ethnography investigating the suitability of emergency teleassistance and telemedical centers for incorporating robotic teleassistance, and (3) a user-validated human-robot interaction concept with three user roles and corresponding three user interfaces designed as a solution to the problem of engineering reliable service robots for home environments

Design of cloud robotic services for senior citizens to improve independent living in multiple environments

The paper proposed a cloud robotic solution for the healthcare management of senior citizens, to demonstrate the opportunity to remotely provide continuous assistive robotic services to a number of seniors regardless to their position in the monitored environment. In particular, a medication reminding, a remote home monitoring and an user indoor localization service were outsourced in the cloud and provided to the robots, users and caregivers on request. The proposed system was composed of a number of robotic agents distributed over two smart environments: a flat at the Domocasa Lab (Peccioli, IT) and a condominium at the Angen site of the Orebro science park (Orebro, SE). The cloud acquired data from remote smart environments and enabled the local robots to provide advanced assistive services to a number of users. The proposed smart environments were able to collect raw data for the environmental monitoring and the localization of the users by means of wireless sensors, and provide such data to the cloud. On the cloud, specific algorithms improved the local robots, by providing event scheduling to accomplish assistive services and situation awareness on the users position and environments’ status. The indoor user localization service, was provided by means of commercial and ad-hoc sensors distributed over the environments and a sensor fusion algorithm on the cloud. The entire cloud solution was evaluated in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) to estimate the effectiveness of the architecture

Improving domiciliary robotic services by integrating the ASTRO Robot in an AmI Infrastructure

This work describes the ECHORD Experiment ASTROMOBILE, a project aimed to design, develop and test a system for favourable independent living, improved quality of life and efficiency of care for senior citizens in domestic environments. The system, composed of a mobile robotic platform (called ASTRO) and an Ambient Intelligent Infrastructure that actively cooperated between them and with the end-user, was designed and implemented with a user-centred design approach, involving different stakeholders. The system was designed to deliver services to users, like drug delivery, stand support, reminding, info-entertainment. The design took advantages of the integration of robotic platforms with smart environments, to provide to users higher quality and localization based services. Senior end-users were involved in the experimentation of the system in the DomoCasa Living Lab and feedbacks were gathered for the technology assessment. Particularly, this paper demonstrates the general feasibility of the ASTROMOBILE system and thanks to users feedbacks its acceptability and usability

On the design, development and experimentation of the ASTRO assistive robot integrated in smart environments

This paper presents the full experience of designing, developing and testing ASTROMOBILE, a system composed of an enhanced robotic platform integrated in an Ambient Intelligent (AmI) infrastructure that was conceived to provide favourable independent living, improved quality of life and efficiency of care for senior citizens. The design and implementation of ASTRO robot was sustained by a multidisciplinary team in which technology developers, designers and end-user representatives collaborated using a user-centred design approach. The key point of this work is to demonstrate the general feasibility and scientific/technical effectiveness of a mobile robotic platform integrated in a smart environment and conceived to provide useful services to humans and in particular to elderly people in domestic environments. The main aspects faced in this paper are related to the design of the ASTRO’s appearance and functionalities by means of a substantial analysis of users’ requirements, the improvement of the ASTRO’s behaviour by means of a smart sensor network able to share information with the robot (Ubiquitous Robotics) and the development of advanced human robot interfaces based on natural language

Development of a Socially Believable Multi-Robot Solution from Town to Home

Technological advances in the robotic and ICT fields represent an effective solution to address specific societal problems to support ageing and independent life. One of the key factors for these technologies is that they have to be socially acceptable and believable to the end-users. This paper aimed to present some technological aspects that have been faced to develop the Robot-Era system, a multi-robotic system that is able to act in a socially believable way in the environments daily inhabited by humans, such as urban areas, buildings and homes. In particular, this paper focuses on two services—shopping delivery and garbage collection—showing preliminary results on experiments conducted with 35 elderly people. The analysis adopts an end-user-oriented perspective, considering some of the main attributes of acceptability: usability, attitude, anxiety, trust and quality of life