A RESTful Architecture for the Development and Deployment of Companion Robots Applications

ABSTRACT Improving the quality of life particularly for the elderly and disabled persons is essential for society today. Despite their existing disabilities and limitations the elderly and the disabled still need and desire to be an integral part of society. Statistics shows that the number of persons requiring home health care in the year 2040 will make up nearly 3.5 % of the population. The need for companion robots is growing with factors such as an aging population, limited infrastructure and social support. Robots capable of assisting people in daily tasks and providing various services represent part of the future solution. The lack of a reusable platform is a significant obstacle to such a solution. In this thesis, we are proposing an architecture that will enable the development and deployment of companion robots applications. The architecture consists of a set of components at different layers, ranging from low-level robotics services to end user application components. The multiple layers interact through RESTful web services. This architecture enables the development of a range of applications, and can deal with robots that have varying capabilities and hardware

Attention-controlled acquisition of a qualitative scene model for mobile robots

Haasch A. Attention-controlled acquisition of a qualitative scene model for mobile robots. Bielefeld (Germany): Bielefeld University; 2007.Robots that are used to support humans in dangerous environments, e.g., in manufacture facilities, are established for decades. Now, a new generation of service robots is focus of current research and about to be introduced. These intelligent service robots are intended to support humans in everyday life. To achieve a most comfortable human-robot interaction with non-expert users it is, thus, imperative for the acceptance of such robots to provide interaction interfaces that we humans are accustomed to in comparison to human-human communication. Consequently, intuitive modalities like gestures or spontaneous speech are needed to teach the robot previously unknown objects and locations. Then, the robot can be entrusted with tasks like fetch-and-carry orders even without an extensive training of the user. In this context, this dissertation introduces the multimodal Object Attention System which offers a flexible integration of common interaction modalities in combination with state-of-the-art image and speech processing techniques from other research projects. To prove the feasibility of the approach the presented Object Attention System has successfully been integrated in different robotic hardware. In particular, the mobile robot BIRON and the anthropomorphic robot BARTHOC of the Applied Computer Science Group at Bielefeld University. Concluding, the aim of this work, to acquire a qualitative Scene Model by a modular component offering object attention mechanisms, has been successfully achieved as demonstrated on numerous occasions like reviews for the EU-integrated Project COGNIRON or demos

Application-driven visual computing towards industry 4.0 2018

245 p.La Tesis recoge contribuciones en tres campos: 1. Agentes Virtuales Interactivos: autónomos, modulares, escalables, ubicuos y atractivos para el usuario. Estos IVA pueden interactuar con los usuarios de manera natural.2. Entornos de RV/RA Inmersivos: RV en la planificación de la producción, el diseño de producto, la simulación de procesos, pruebas y verificación. El Operario Virtual muestra cómo la RV y los Co-bots pueden trabajar en un entorno seguro. En el Operario Aumentado la RA muestra información relevante al trabajador de una manera no intrusiva. 3. Gestión Interactiva de Modelos 3D: gestión online y visualización de modelos CAD multimedia, mediante conversión automática de modelos CAD a la Web. La tecnología Web3D permite la visualización e interacción de estos modelos en dispositivos móviles de baja potencia.Además, estas contribuciones han permitido analizar los desafíos presentados por Industry 4.0. La tesis ha contribuido a proporcionar una prueba de concepto para algunos de esos desafíos: en factores humanos, simulación, visualización e integración de modelos

Ubiquitous Robotics System for Knowledge-based Auto-configuration System for Service Delivery within Smart Home Environments

The future smart home will be enhanced and driven by the recent advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), which advocates the integration of computational devices within an Internet architecture on a global scale [1, 2]. In the IoT paradigm, the smart home will be developed by interconnecting a plethora of smart objects both inside and outside the home environment [3-5]. The recent take-up of these connected devices within home environments is slowly and surely transforming traditional home living environments. Such connected and integrated home environments lead to the concept of the smart home, which has attracted significant research efforts to enhance the functionality of home environments with a wide range of novel services. The wide availability of services and devices within contemporary smart home environments make their management a challenging and rewarding task. The trend whereby the development of smart home services is decoupled from that of smart home devices increases the complexity of this task. As such, it is desirable that smart home services are developed and deployed independently, rather than pre-bundled with specific devices, although it must be recognised that this is not always practical. Moreover, systems need to facilitate the deployment process and cope with any changes in the target environment after deployment. Maintaining complex smart home systems throughout their lifecycle entails considerable resources and effort. These challenges have stimulated the need for dynamic auto-configurable services amongst such distributed systems. Although significant research has been directed towards achieving auto-configuration, none of the existing solutions is sufficient to achieve auto-configuration within smart home environments. All such solutions are considered incomplete, as they lack the ability to meet all smart home requirements efficiently. These requirements include the ability to adapt flexibly to new and dynamic home environments without direct user intervention. Fulfilling these requirements would enhance the performance of smart home systems and help to address cost-effectiveness, considering the financial implications of the manual configuration of smart home environments. Current configuration approaches fail to meet one or more of the requirements of smart homes. If one of these approaches meets the flexibility criterion, the configuration is either not executed online without affecting the system or requires direct user intervention. In other words, there is no adequate solution to allow smart home systems to adapt dynamically to changing circumstances, hence to enable the correct interconnections among its components without direct user intervention and the interruption of the whole system. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an efficient, adaptive, agile and flexible system that adapts dynamically to each new requirement of the smart home environment. This research aims to devise methods to automate the activities associated with customised service delivery for dynamic home environments by exploiting recent advances in the field of ubiquitous robotics and Semantic Web technologies. It introduces a novel approach called the Knowledge-based Auto-configuration Software Robot (Sobot) for Smart Home Environments, which utilises the Sobot to achieve auto-configuration of the system. The research work was conducted under the Distributed Integrated Care Services and Systems (iCARE) project, which was designed to accomplish and deliver integrated distributed ecosystems with a homecare focus. The auto-configuration Sobot which is the focus of this thesis is a key component of the iCARE project. It will become one of the key enabling technologies for generic smart home environments. It has a profound impact on designing and implementing a high quality system. Its main role is to generate a feasible configuration that meets the given requirements using the knowledgebase of the smart home environment as a core component. The knowledgebase plays a pivotal role in helping the Sobot to automatically select the most appropriate resources in a given context-aware system via semantic searching and matching. Ontology as a technique of knowledgebase representation generally helps to design and develop a specific domain. It is also a key technology for the Semantic Web, which enables a common understanding amongst software agents and people, clarifies the domain assumptions and facilitates the reuse and analysis of its knowledge. The main advantages of the Sobot over traditional applications is its awareness of the changing digital and physical environments and its ability to interpret these changes, extract the relevant contextual data and merge any new information or knowledge. The Sobot is capable of creating new or alternative feasible configurations to meet the system’s goal by utilising inferred facts based on the smart home ontological model, so that the system can adapt to the changed environment. Furthermore, the Sobot has the capability to execute the generated reconfiguration plan without interrupting the running of the system. A proof-of-concept testbed has been designed and implemented. The case studies carried out have shown the potential of the proposed approach to achieve flexible and reliable auto-configuration of the smart home system, with promising directions for future research

"A model-driven approach for designing multi-platform user interface dialogues": dialogues specification

Human-computer interaction becomes sophisticated, multimodal and multi device and needs to be well-designed with the aim of facilitating application correction (i.e. to correcting errors/bugs in the application) or extension (i.e. adding new functionalities or modifying existing tasks). This thesis is focused on building a methodology of designing and specifying User Interface (UI) behaviour. The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is used to describe in detail the conceptual model and to define all its objects. The methodology flux diagram is provided with the specification of the consistency and the completeness properties of the transformation model. To support the methodology, we implement a graphic Dialog Editor in which Models are organized in three levels (abstract, concrete and final) according to Cameleon Reference Framework (CFR) and, whose process respects the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach. Furthermore, the use of Dialog Editor is illustrated through a simple exam...Les interfaces Homme-Machine deviennent de plus en plus complexes. Leur conception nécessite des nouveaux outils et/ou méthodes. En exploitant l'aproche orienté-modèle, cette thèse repond à ce besoin en proposant une méthodologie de conception des dialogues multi-plateform

Developing an Autonomous Mobile Robotic Device for Monitoring and Assisting Older People

A progressive increase of the elderly population in the world has required technological solutions capable of improving the life prospects of people suffering from senile dementias such as Alzheimer's. Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) in the research field of elderly care is a solution that can ensure, through observation and monitoring of behaviors, their safety and improve their physical and cognitive health. A social robot can autonomously and tirelessly monitor a person daily by providing assistive tasks such as remembering to take medication and suggesting activities to keep the assisted active both physically and cognitively. However, many projects in this area have not considered the preferences, needs, personality, and cognitive profiles of older people. Moreover, other projects have developed specific robotic applications making it difficult to reuse and adapt them on other hardware devices and for other different functional contexts. This thesis presents the development of a scalable, modular, multi-tenant robotic application and its testing in real-world environments. This work is part of the UPA4SAR project ``User-centered Profiling and Adaptation for Socially Assistive Robotics''. The UPA4SAR project aimed to develop a low-cost robotic application for faster deployment among the elderly population. The architecture of the proposed robotic system is modular, robust, and scalable due to the development of functionality in microservices with event-based communication. To improve robot acceptance the functionalities, enjoyed through microservices, adapt the robot's behaviors based on the preferences and personality of the assisted person. A key part of the assistance is the monitoring of activities that are recognized through deep neural network models proposed in this work. The final experimentation of the project carried out in the homes of elderly volunteers was performed with complete autonomy of the robotic system. Daily care plans customized to the person's needs and preferences were executed. These included notification tasks to remember when to take medication, tasks to check if basic nutrition activities were accomplished, entertainment and companionship tasks with games, videos, music for cognitive and physical stimulation of the patient

Architecture of participation : the realization of the Semantic Web, and Internet OS

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, February 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-68).The Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) is becoming an integral part of our daily life and touching every part of the society around the world including both well-developed and developing countries. The simple technology and genuine intention of the original WWW, which is to help researchers share and exchange information and data across incompatible platforms and systems, have evolved into something larger and beyond what one could conceive. While WWW has reached the critical mass, many limitations are uncovered. To address the limitations, the development of its extension, the Semantic Web, has been underway for more than five years by the inventor of WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, and the technical community. Yet, no significant impact has been made. Its awareness by the public is surprisingly and unfortunately low. This thesis will review the development effort of the Semantic Web, examine its progress which appears lagging compared to WWW, and propose a promising business model to accelerate its adoption path.by Shelley Lau.S.M

Human Machine Interaction

In this book, the reader will find a set of papers divided into two sections. The first section presents different proposals focused on the human-machine interaction development process. The second section is devoted to different aspects of interaction, with a special emphasis on the physical interaction