Development of an anthropomorphic mobile manipulator with human, machine and environment interaction

An anthropomorphic mobile manipulator robot (CHARMIE) is being developed by the University of Minho's Automation and Robotics Laboratory (LAR). The robot gathers sensorial information and processes using neural networks, actuating in real time. The robot's two arms allow object and machine interaction. Its anthropomorphic structure is advantageous since machines are designed and optimized for human interaction. Sound output allows it to relay information to workers and provide feedback. Allying these features with communication with a database or remote operator results in establishment of a bridge between the physical environment and virtual domain. The goal is an increase in information flow and accessibility. This paper presents the current state of the project, intended features and how it can contribute to the development of Industry 4.0. Focus is given to already finished work, detailing the methodology used for two of the robot's subsystems: locomotion system; lower limbs of the robot.- This project has been supported by the ALGORITMI Research Centre of University of Minho's School of Engineering

The Use of Service Robots in Service Delivery : A Review of the Literature

Service robots as emerging service providers, in combination with novel technologies like artificial intelligence, have the potential to enhance service outcomes and customer experience and may already be transforming the service delivery process. At present, the study focused on service robots has matured sufficiently to warrant an overview of the research on the ways in which service robots have been employed. This study conducts a systematic literature review of the academic corpus focused on service robots (N = 28). We report the research methods, application contexts and robot types of service robot research to understand how service robots participate in service delivery, what technological characteristics of service robots are commonly analyzed, and the potential service outcomes of service robot use. This review shows that overall, service robots have a high potential to delivery services in service contexts, and will be widely used and bring more rich service experience to people.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

A Reference Software Architecture for Social Robots

Social Robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalised interaction with their users. Moreover, in this context recurrent software design issues such as ensuring interoperability, improving reusability and customizability of software components also arise. Designing and implementing social robotic software architectures is a time-intensive activity requiring multi-disciplinary expertise: this makes difficult to rapidly develop, customise, and personalise robotic solutions. These challenges may be mitigated at design time by choosing certain architectural styles, implementing specific architectural patterns and using particular technologies. Leveraging on our experience in the MARIO project, in this paper we propose a series of principles that social robots may benefit from. These principles lay also the foundations for the design of a reference software architecture for Social Robots. The ultimate goal of this work is to establish a common ground based on a reference software architecture to allow to easily reuse robotic software components in order to rapidly develop, implement, and personalise Social Robots

A literature review on humanoid robot usage ın service industry

Modern anlamda ilk insansı robot, 1973 yılında geliştirilmiştir. Zaman içerisinde gerçekleşen teknolojik gelişmeler, daha karmaşık görevleri yerine getiren insansı robotların üretilmesini sağlamıştır. Bu durum, insansı robotların kullanımını giderek yaygınlaştırmıştır. İnsansı robotların iş dünyasında giderek yaygınlaşması, onlarla etkileşime geçen bireylerin algı, tutum ve davranışlarının belirlenmesini önemli hale getirmiştir. Bu konuda tüketicilerin algı, tutum ve davranışları belirsizdir. Ayrıca insansı robotların giderek çalışanların yerini alması ya da çalışanlarla birlikte görevleri yerine getirmesi, çalışanlar üzerine stres oluşturmaktadır. Bununla birlikte işverenlerin, konuya verimlilik ve maliyet açısından yaklaştığı görülmektedir. Ülkemizde insansı robot kavramı, genel olarak mühendislik bakış açısıyla incelenmiştir. Sosyal bilim temelinde yapılan çalışmaların daha sınırlı olduğu görülmektedir. Bu çalışmada insansı robot ve hizmet sektöründe insansı robot kullanımı üzerine yapılan araştırmalar incelenmektedir. Literatürde konunun farklı hizmet türlerinde, farklı katılımcılar üzerinde çeşitli teknikler kullanılarak incelendiği görülmektedir. Yapılan incelemelere göre, insansı robotların performanslarının yeterli olarak görülmediği, genel olarak bireylerin insansı robota karşı tutum ve davranışlarının olumlu olduğu belirlenmiştir. Çalışmanın tüketici davranışları ve hizmet sektörü üzerinde çalışan akademisyenlere yeni araştırma konuları belirleme konusunda rehberlik etmesi ve insansı robot yatırımları konusuna da uygulamacıların dikkatini çekmesi beklenmektedir.The first humanoid robot in the modern sense was developed in 1973. Technological advances over time have enabled the production of humanoid robots that perform more complex tasks. This situation has made the use of humanoid robots increasingly widespread. The increasing prevalence of humanoid robots in the business world has made it important to determine the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of individuals interacting with them. Consumers' perceptions, attitudes and behaviors are unclear in this regard. Besides, humanoid robots increasingly replace employees or perform tasks together with employees creates stress on employees. However, it is seen that employers approach the issue in terms of productivity and cost. In our country, the concept of humanoid robot has been studied from an engineering point of view. It is seen that studies on the basis of social science are more limited. In this study, studies on humanoid robot and humanoid robot in service sector are examined. In the literature, it is seen that the subject is examined in different service types, on different participants, using various techniques. According to examinations, it has been determined that the performance of humanoid robots is not seen as sufficient, and the attitudes and behaviors of individuals towards humanoid robots are generally positive. It is expected that the study will guide academicians working on consumer behavior and the service sector in determining new research topics and draw the attention of practitioners to the subject of the subject humanoid robot investments

Personal Robot Technologies to Support Older People Living Independently

The world’s population is ageing, and the number of younger people available to care for the older population is decreasing. Digital technologies, particularly robotic technologies, are considered an important part of the solution to this looming problem. This chapter reviews some of the research over the last decade (2013 – 2023) on the development and evaluation of personal robots to assist older people living independently. The research is divided into three areas: that on older people’s needs and desires in relation to personal robots and their attitudes towards robots; their reactions to personal robots after a brief experience with them; and the evaluation of older people’s longer-term use of personal robots. Strengths and weaknesses of the research are discussed, as well as areas of need for further research.Die Weltbevölkerung altert und die Zahl der jüngeren Menschen, die für die Pflege der älteren Bevölkerung zur Verfügung stehen, nimmt ab. Digitale Technologien, insbesondere Robotertechnologien, gelten als wichtiger Teil der Lösung für dieses drohende Problem. Dieses Kapitel gibt einen Überblick über die Forschung der letzten zehn Jahre (2013 - 2023) zur Entwicklung und Bewertung von persönlichen Robotern, die ältere Menschen dabei unterstützen, ein unabhängiges Leben zu führen. Die Forschung ist in drei Bereiche unterteilt: die Bedürfnisse und Wünsche älterer Menschen in Bezug auf persönliche Roboter und ihre Einstellung zu Robotern; ihre Reaktionen auf persönliche Roboter nach kurzer Erfahrung mit ihnen; und die Bewertung der längerfristigen Nutzung persönlicher Roboter durch ältere Menschen. Stärken und Schwächen der Forschung werden diskutiert, ebenso wie Bereiche, in denen weitere Forschung notwendig ist

Conversational affective social robots for ageing and dementia support

Socially assistive robots (SAR) hold significant potential to assist older adults and people with dementia in human engagement and clinical contexts by supporting mental health and independence at home. While SAR research has recently experienced prolific growth, long-term trust, clinical translation and patient benefit remain immature. Affective human-robot interactions are unresolved and the deployment of robots with conversational abilities is fundamental for robustness and humanrobot engagement. In this paper, we review the state of the art within the past two decades, design trends, and current applications of conversational affective SAR for ageing and dementia support. A horizon scanning of AI voice technology for healthcare, including ubiquitous smart speakers, is further introduced to address current gaps inhibiting home use. We discuss the role of user-centred approaches in the design of voice systems, including the capacity to handle communication breakdowns for effective use by target populations. We summarise the state of development in interactions using speech and natural language processing, which forms a baseline for longitudinal health monitoring and cognitive assessment. Drawing from this foundation, we identify open challenges and propose future directions to advance conversational affective social robots for: 1) user engagement, 2) deployment in real-world settings, and 3) clinical translation

Systematic literature review of validation methods for AI systems

Context: Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into everyday activities, particularly through new techniques such as machine learning (ML). These techniques are implementable with little domain knowledge. This, combined with the difficulty of testing AI systems with traditional methods, has made system trustworthiness a pressing issue. Objective: This paper studies the methods used to validate practical AI systems reported in the literature. Our goal is to classify and describe the methods that are used in realistic settings to ensure the dependability of AI systems. Method: A systematic literature review resulted in 90 papers. Systems presented in the papers were analysed based on their domain, task, complexity, and applied validation methods. Results: The validation methods were synthesized into a taxonomy consisting of trial, simulation, model-centred validation, and expert opinion. Failure monitors, safety channels, redundancy, voting, and input and output restrictions are methods used to continuously validate the systems after deployment. Conclusions: Our results clarify existing strategies applied to validation. They form a basis for the synthesization, assessment, and refinement of AI system validation in research and guidelines for validating individual systems in practice. While various validation strategies have all been relatively widely applied, only few studies report on continuous validation.Peer reviewe

Acceptance in Incomplete Argumentation Frameworks

A Abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs), originally proposed by Dung, constitute a central formal model for the study of computational aspects of argumentation in AI. Credulous and skeptical acceptance of arguments in a given AF are well-studied problems both in terms of theoretical analysis-especially computational complexity-and the development of practical decision procedures for the problems. However, AFs make the assumption that all attacks between arguments are certain (i.e., present attacks are known to exist, and missing attacks are known to not exist), which can in various settings be a restrictive assumption. A generalization of AFs to incomplete AFs was recently proposed as a formalism that allows the representation of both uncertain attacks and uncertain arguments in AFs. In this article, we explore the impact of allowing for modeling such uncertainties in AFs on the computational complexity of natural generalizations of acceptance problems to incomplete AFs under various central AF semantics. Complementing the complexity-theoretic analysis, we also develop the first practical decision procedures for all of the NP-hard variants of acceptance in incomplete AFs. In terms of complexity analysis, we establish a full complexity landscape, showing that depending on the variant of acceptance and property/semantics, the complexity of acceptance in incomplete AFs ranges from polynomial-time decidable to completeness for Sigma(p)(3). In terms of algorithms, we show through an extensive empirical evaluation that an implementation of the proposed decision procedures, based on boolean satisfiability (SAT) solving, is effective in deciding variants of acceptance under uncertainties. We also establish conditions for what type of atomic changes are guaranteed to be redundant from the perspective of preserving extensions of completions of incomplete AFs, and show that the results allow for considerably improving the empirical efficiency of the proposed SAT-based counterexample-guided abstraction refinement algorithms for acceptance in incomplete AFs for problem variants with complexity beyond NP. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.Peer reviewe

Scalable Human-Machine Interaction System for Real-Time Care in the Internet of Health Things

The rise in numbers of individuals with weak immunity around the world and the aging of populations put an ever-growing pressure on healthcare and inevitably increases its cost. This phenomenon leads to larger portions of the population to which quality healthcare is not provided. To fight this trend, technological advancements in the Internet of Health Things aim to integrate smart sensors and devices to continuously monitor and assess the status of patients and older adults from the comfort of their own home at a fraction of the cost. Although solving specific problems each at a time advances the field and takes us a step closer to autonomous home care systems, the solution to these issues needs to consider the much larger picture to unify the approaches and cultivate benefits of many intelligent, but stand-alone, systems. The current work aims to explore the field of Internet of Health Things and its application to remote health monitoring and ambient assisted living for older adults. Picking up from where previous literature left off, this thesis proposes a multi-layered framework that provides a comprehensive solution to continuous healthcare. In particular, the framework was created with modularity, scalability, and expandability as the main priorities; to offer an all-purpose remedy to the problems in hand. To this end, the internal mechanisms of the framework are described in detail and the system is applied to remote health monitoring and ambient assisted living environments by interchanging its components. The implementations presented in this thesis expose the capability of the framework to harvest power of existing intelligent devices. Moreover, the two systems implemented consider multi-modal and natural human-machine interaction techniques that provide the user with the choice of their preferred interaction method. The main advantage of the proposed framework is that it offers an all-in-one solution to providing continuous healthcare without sacrificing the quality of care provided. On the contrary, the solution in this work allows deeper understanding of user's health, personalization, real-time analytics and recommendations, as well as aid for activities of daily living with state of the art technologies