58,651 research outputs found

    Evaluating the use of robots to enlarge AAL services

    Get PDF
    We introduce robots as a tools to enhance Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services. Robots are a unique opportunity to create new systems to cooperate in reaching better living conditions. Robots offer the possibility of richer interaction with humans, and can perform actions to actively change the environment. The current state-of-art includes skills in various areas, including advanced interaction (natural language, visual attention, object recognition, intention learning), navigation (map learning, obstacle avoidance), manipulation (grasping, use of tools), and cognitive architectures to handle highly unpredictable environments. From our experience in several robotics projects and principally in the RoboCup@Home competition, a new set of evaluation methods is proposed to assess the maturity of the required skills. Such comparison should ideally enable the abstraction from the particular robotic platform and concentrate on the easy comparison of skills. The validity of that low-level skills can be then scaled to more complex tasks, that are composed by several skills. Our conclusion is that effective evaluation methods can be designed with the objective of enabling robots to enlarge AAL services.This research was partly supported by the PATRICIA project (TIN2012-38416-C03-01), MANIPlus project (201350E102), Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and European Found for Regional Development (FEDER).Peer Reviewe

    Robot life: simulation and participation in the study of evolution and social behavior.

    Get PDF
    This paper explores the case of using robots to simulate evolution, in particular the case of Hamilton's Law. The uses of robots raises several questions that this paper seeks to address. The first concerns the role of the robots in biological research: do they simulate something (life, evolution, sociality) or do they participate in something? The second question concerns the physicality of the robots: what difference does embodiment make to the role of the robot in these experiments. Thirdly, how do life, embodiment and social behavior relate in contemporary biology and why is it possible for robots to illuminate this relation? These questions are provoked by a strange similarity that has not been noted before: between the problem of simulation in philosophy of science, and Deleuze's reading of Plato on the relationship of ideas, copies and simulacra

    Exploring the Design Space of Robot Appearance and Behavior in an Attention-Seeking Living Room Scenario for a Robot Companion

    Get PDF
    This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.---- Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. --DOI : 10.1109/ALIFE.2007.36781

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

    Get PDF
    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

    Bio-inspired Tensegrity Soft Modular Robots

    Get PDF
    In this paper, we introduce a design principle to develop novel soft modular robots based on tensegrity structures and inspired by the cytoskeleton of living cells. We describe a novel strategy to realize tensegrity structures using planar manufacturing techniques, such as 3D printing. We use this strategy to develop icosahedron tensegrity structures with programmable variable stiffness that can deform in a three-dimensional space. We also describe a tendon-driven contraction mechanism to actively control the deformation of the tensegrity mod-ules. Finally, we validate the approach in a modular locomotory worm as a proof of concept.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Living Machine conference 201
    • …
    corecore