21,817 research outputs found
Tracing commodities in indoor environments for service robotics
Daily life assistance for elderly people is one of the most promising scenarios for service robots in the the near future. In particular, the go-and-fetch task will be one of the most demanding tasks in these cases. In this paper, we present an informationally structured room that supports a service robot in the task of daily object fetching. Our environment contains different distributed sensors including a floor sensing system and several intelligent cabinets. Sensor information is send to a centralized management system which process the data and make it available to a service robot which is assisting people in the room. We additionally present the first steps of an intelligent framework used to maintain information about locations of commodities in our informationally structured room. This information will be used by the service robot to find objects under people requests. One of the main goal of our intelligent environment is to maintain a small number of sensors to avoid interfering with the daily activity of people, and to reduce as much as possible invasion of their privacy. In order to compensate this limited available sensor information, our framework aims to exploit knowledge about people's activity and interaction with objects, to infer reliable information about the location of commodities. This paper presents simulated results that demonstrate the suitability of this framework to be applied to a service robotic environment equipped with limited sensors. In addition we discuss some preliminary experiments using our real environment and robot
RFID Localisation For Internet Of Things Smart Homes: A Survey
The Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous business opportunities in
fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others.
The IoT incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area
wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications.
Localisation in indoor positioning systems plays an important role in the IoT.
Location Based IoT applications range from tracking objects and people in
real-time, assets management, agriculture, assisted monitoring technologies for
healthcare, and smart homes, to name a few. Radio Frequency based systems for
indoor positioning such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key
enabler technology for the IoT due to its costeffective, high readability
rates, automatic identification and, importantly, its energy efficiency
characteristic. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art RFID technologies in
IoT Smart Homes applications. It presents several comparable studies of RFID
based projects in smart homes and discusses the applications, techniques,
algorithms, and challenges of adopting RFID technologies in IoT smart home
systems.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 3 table
Open World Assistive Grasping Using Laser Selection
Many people with motor disabilities are unable to complete activities of
daily living (ADLs) without assistance. This paper describes a complete robotic
system developed to provide mobile grasping assistance for ADLs. The system is
comprised of a robot arm from a Rethink Robotics Baxter robot mounted to an
assistive mobility device, a control system for that arm, and a user interface
with a variety of access methods for selecting desired objects. The system uses
grasp detection to allow previously unseen objects to be picked up by the
system. The grasp detection algorithms also allow for objects to be grasped in
cluttered environments. We evaluate our system in a number of experiments on a
large variety of objects. Overall, we achieve an object selection success rate
of 88% and a grasp detection success rate of 90% in a non-mobile scenario, and
success rates of 89% and 72% in a mobile scenario
Enhancing smart environments with mobile robots
Sensor networks are becoming popular nowadays in the development of smart environments. Heavily relying on static sensor and actuators, though, such environments usually lacks of versatility regarding the provided services and interaction capabilities. Here we present a framework for smart environments where a service robot is included within the sensor network acting as a mobile sensor and/or actuator. Our framework integrates on-the-shelf technologies to ensure its adaptability to a variety of sensor technologies and robotic software. Two pilot cases
are presented as evaluation of our proposal.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional AndalucĂa Tech
Social robots for older users: a possibility to support assessment and social interventions
In the last decades, various researches in the field of robotics have
created numerous opportunities for innovative support of the older population.
The goal of this work was to review and highlight how social robots can help
the daily life of older people, and be useful also as assessment tools. We will
underline the aspects of usability and acceptability of robotic supports in the
psychosocial work with older persons. The actual usability of the system influences the perception of the ease of use only when the user has no or low experience, while expert users’ perception is related to their attitude towards the robot. This finding should be more deeply analysed because it may have a strong
influence on the design of future interfaces for elderly-robot interaction. Robots
can play an important role to tackle the societal challenge of the growing older
population. The authors report some recent studies with older users, where it
was demonstrated that the acceptability of robotics during daily life activities,
and also in cognitive evaluation, could be supported by social robot
Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people
This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of
elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly
people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new
applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses
the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and
users for which service robots are and are not suitable
Fast and Robust Detection of Fallen People from a Mobile Robot
This paper deals with the problem of detecting fallen people lying on the
floor by means of a mobile robot equipped with a 3D depth sensor. In the
proposed algorithm, inspired by semantic segmentation techniques, the 3D scene
is over-segmented into small patches. Fallen people are then detected by means
of two SVM classifiers: the first one labels each patch, while the second one
captures the spatial relations between them. This novel approach showed to be
robust and fast. Indeed, thanks to the use of small patches, fallen people in
real cluttered scenes with objects side by side are correctly detected.
Moreover, the algorithm can be executed on a mobile robot fitted with a
standard laptop making it possible to exploit the 2D environmental map built by
the robot and the multiple points of view obtained during the robot navigation.
Additionally, this algorithm is robust to illumination changes since it does
not rely on RGB data but on depth data. All the methods have been thoroughly
validated on the IASLAB-RGBD Fallen Person Dataset, which is published online
as a further contribution. It consists of several static and dynamic sequences
with 15 different people and 2 different environments
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