Design and development of a self-adaptive, reconfigurable and low-cost robotic arm

This study presents the design, development and control of a low-cost, self-adaptive robotic arm with the advantages of being modular and reconfigurable to perform a variety of tasks in different applications such as education, medicine and assistance for daily living activities. Particularly for educational purposes, the robot arms can be differently assembled to fulfill various tasks and its mechanical and control scenarios can be studied in the courses

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

Mobile assistive technologies for the visually impaired

There are around 285 million visually impaired people worldwide, and around 370,000 people are registered as blind or partially sighted in the UK. Ongoing advances in information technology (IT) are increasing the scope for IT-based mobile assistive technologies to facilitate the independence, safety, and improved quality of life of the visually impaired. Research is being directed at making mobile phones and other handheld devices accessible via our haptic (touch) and audio sensory channels. We review research and innovation within the field of mobile assistive technology for the visually impaired and, in so doing, highlight the need for successful collaboration between clinical expertise, computer science, and domain users to realize fully the potential benefits of such technologies. We initially reflect on research that has been conducted to make mobile phones more accessible to people with vision loss. We then discuss innovative assistive applications designed for the visually impaired that are either delivered via mainstream devices and can be used while in motion (e.g., mobile phones) or are embedded within an environment that may be in motion (e.g., public transport) or within which the user may be in motion (e.g., smart homes)

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

Granny and the robots: ethical issues in robot care for the elderly

The growing proportion of elderly people in society, together with recent advances in robotics, makes the use of robots in elder care increasingly likely. We outline developments in the areas of robot applications for assisting the elderly and their carers, for monitoring their health and safety, and for providing them with companionship. Despite the possible benefits, we raise and discuss six main ethical concerns associated with: the potential reduction in the amount of human contact; an increase in the feelings of objectification and loss of control; a loss of privacy; a loss of personal liberty; deception and infantilisation; the circumstances in which elderly people should be allowed to control robots. We conclude by balancing the care benefits against the ethical costs. If introduced with foresight and careful guidelines, robots and robotic technology could improve the lives of the elderly, reducing their dependence, and creating more opportunities for social interactio

Variable structure robot control systems: The RAPP approach

International audienceThis paper presents a method of designing variable structure control systems for robots. As the on-board robot computational resources are limited, but in some cases the demands imposed on the robot by the user are virtually limitless, the solution is to produce a variable structure system. The task dependent part has to be exchanged, however the task governs the activities of the robot. Thus not only exchange of some task-dependent modules is required, but also supervisory responsibilities have to be switched. Such control systems are necessary in the case of robot companions, where the owner of the robot may demand from it to provide many services.

Belief-Space Planning for Resourceful Manipulation and Mobility

Robots are increasingly expected to work in partially observable and unstructured environments. They need to select actions that exploit perceptual and motor resourcefulness to manage uncertainty based on the demands of the task and environment. The research in this dissertation makes two primary contributions. First, it develops a new concept in resourceful robot platforms called the UMass uBot and introduces the sixth and seventh in the uBot series. uBot-6 introduces multiple postural configurations that enable different modes of mobility and manipulation to meet the needs of a wide variety of tasks and environmental constraints. uBot-7 extends this with the use of series elastic actuators (SEAs) to improve manipulation capabilities and support safer operation around humans. The resourcefulness of these robots is complemented with a belief-space planning framework that enables task-driven action selection in the context of the partially observable environment. The framework uses a compact but expressive state representation based on object models. We extend an existing affordance-based object model, called an aspect transition graph (ATG), with geometric information. This enables object-centric modeling of features and actions, making the model much more expressive without increasing the complexity. A novel task representation enables the belief-space planner to perform general object-centric tasks ranging from recognition to manipulation of objects. The approach supports the efficient handling of multi-object scenes. The combination of the physical platform and the planning framework are evaluated in two novel, challenging, partially observable planning domains. The ARcube domain provides a large population of objects that are highly ambiguous. Objects can only be differentiated using multi-modal sensor information and manual interactions. In the dexterous mobility domain, a robot can employ multiple mobility modes to complete navigation tasks under a variety of possible environment constraints. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using experiments in simulation and on a real robot

An Opportunistic Service Oriented Approach for Robot Search

Health care for the elderly poses a major challenge as the baby boomer generation ages. Part of the solution is to develop technology using sensor networks and service robotics to increase the length of time that an elder can remain at home. Since moderate immobility and memory impairment are common as people age, a major problem for the elderly is locating and retrieving frequently used common objects such as keys, cellphones, books, etc. However, for robots to assist people while they search for objects, they must possess the ability to interact with the human client, complex client-side environments and heterogeneous sensorimotor resources. Given this complexity, the traditional approach of developing particular control strategies in a top-down manner is not suitable. In this dissertation an opportunistic service-oriented approach is presented to address the robot search problem in residential eldercare. With the presented approach, a hierarchy of search strategies is developed in a bottom-up manner from passive object detection and retrieval performed by embedded camera sensors to context-aware cooperative search performed by a human-robot team. By opportunistically employing available sensorimotor resources, the robotic application achieves increased search performance, and has the flexibility to balance between performance goals and resource constraints. To evaluate the proposed approach, I describe several experiments with a robot-sensor network that includes the UMass uBot-5, Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras and wireless sensors. The results of these experiments suggest that the robot search application based on the proposed approach can lead to efficient search performance and great flexibility in resource-constrained environments

Reconnaissance de locuteurs pour robot mobile

L'audition artificielle est de plus en plus utilisée en robotique mobile pour améliorer l'interaction humain-robot. La reconnaissance de la parole occupe présentement une place importante tandis qu'un intérêt particulier se développe pour la reconnaissance de locuteurs. Le système ManyEars permet actuellement à un robot mobile de localiser, suivre et séparer plusieurs sources sonores. Ce système utilise un ensemble de huit microphones qui sont disposés en cube. Ce mémoire porte sur la conception et l'évaluation d'un système de reconnaissance de locuteurs, baptisé WISS (Who IS Speaking), couplé au système ManyEars. Le système de reconnaissance de locuteurs conçu est robuste au bruit ambiant et au changement d'environnement. Une technique de combinaison de modèle parallèle (parallel model combination (PMC)) et des masques sont utilisés pour améliorer le taux d'identification dans un milieu bruité. Un indice de confiance est également introduit pour pondérer les identifications obtenues. La simplicité du système proposé fait en sorte qu'il est possible d'exécuter en temps réel l'algorithme sur un processeur généraliste ( General Purpose Processor (GPP)). Les performances du système sont établies à l'aide de plusieurs scénarios. Dans un premier lieu, des enregistrements sont diffusés dans des haut-parleurs pour un ensemble de vingt locuteurs. Le système est ainsi caractérisé en fonction des positions angulaires et radiales des sources sonores. Le taux de reconnaissance est affecté par la qualité du signal (i.e. diminution du rapport signal sur bruit ( Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR))) : il passe de 95.6% à 84.3% en moyenne lorsque le SNR passe d'environ 16 dB à 2 dB lorsque le locuteur se situe à 1.5 mètres des microphones. Par la suite, un scénario dit statique est vérifié à l'aide de quatre locuteurs qui récitent chacun leur tour des phrases à un volume de voix naturel. Finalement, un scénario dynamique dans lequel un groupe de quatre locuteurs ont une conversation naturelle avec des chevauchements entre les segments de paroles est étudié. Le taux de reconnaissance varie entre 74.2% et 100.0% (avec une moyenne de 90.6%) avec le scénario statique, et entre 42.6% et 100.0% avec le scénario dynamique (avec des moyennes de 58.3%, 72.8% et 81.4% pour des segments de 1, 2 et 3 secondes respectivement). Des solutions sont identifiées afin d'améliorer les performances lors de travaux futurs. Au meilleur de notre connaissance, il n'existe aucun système qui effectue une reconnaissance de locuteurs dans un environnement contaminé simultanément par des bruits convolutif et additif. De plus, l'utilisation de masques pour estimer ces bruits est un nouveau concept. Ces masques sont d'ailleurs généralement employés pour la reconnaissance de la parole et leur utilisation dans un contexte de reconnaissance de locuteur est une première. De plus, une caractérisation complète du système qui inclue les SNRs est proposée en fonction de la position du locuteur, ce qui est rarement disponible dans la littérature en audition artificielle pour les robots