Assistive technology design and development for acceptable robotics companions for ageing years

© 2013 Farshid Amirabdollahian et al., licensee Versita Sp. z o. o. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author.A new stream of research and development responds to changes in life expectancy across the world. It includes technologies which enhance well-being of individuals, specifically for older people. The ACCOMPANY project focuses on home companion technologies and issues surrounding technology development for assistive purposes. The project responds to some overlooked aspects of technology design, divided into multiple areas such as empathic and social human-robot interaction, robot learning and memory visualisation, and monitoring persons’ activities at home. To bring these aspects together, a dedicated task is identified to ensure technological integration of these multiple approaches on an existing robotic platform, Care-O-Bot®3 in the context of a smart-home environment utilising a multitude of sensor arrays. Formative and summative evaluation cycles are then used to assess the emerging prototype towards identifying acceptable behaviours and roles for the robot, for example role as a butler or a trainer, while also comparing user requirements to achieved progress. In a novel approach, the project considers ethical concerns and by highlighting principles such as autonomy, independence, enablement, safety and privacy, it embarks on providing a discussion medium where user views on these principles and the existing tension between some of these principles, for example tension between privacy and autonomy over safety, can be captured and considered in design cycles and throughout project developmentsPeer reviewe

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Towards Assistive Feeding with a General-Purpose Mobile Manipulator

General-purpose mobile manipulators have the potential to serve as a versatile form of assistive technology. However, their complexity creates challenges, including the risk of being too difficult to use. We present a proof-of-concept robotic system for assistive feeding that consists of a Willow Garage PR2, a high-level web-based interface, and specialized autonomous behaviors for scooping and feeding yogurt. As a step towards use by people with disabilities, we evaluated our system with 5 able-bodied participants. All 5 successfully ate yogurt using the system and reported high rates of success for the system's autonomous behaviors. Also, Henry Evans, a person with severe quadriplegia, operated the system remotely to feed an able-bodied person. In general, people who operated the system reported that it was easy to use, including Henry. The feeding system also incorporates corrective actions designed to be triggered either autonomously or by the user. In an offline evaluation using data collected with the feeding system, a new version of our multimodal anomaly detection system outperformed prior versions.Comment: This short 4-page paper was accepted and presented as a poster on May. 16, 2016 in ICRA 2016 workshop on 'Human-Robot Interfaces for Enhanced Physical Interactions' organized by Arash Ajoudani, Barkan Ugurlu, Panagiotis Artemiadis, Jun Morimoto. It was peer reviewed by one reviewe

Quantum Robot: Structure, Algorithms and Applications

A kind of brand-new robot, quantum robot, is proposed through fusing quantum theory with robot technology. Quantum robot is essentially a complex quantum system and it is generally composed of three fundamental parts: MQCU (multi quantum computing units), quantum controller/actuator, and information acquisition units. Corresponding to the system structure, several learning control algorithms including quantum searching algorithm and quantum reinforcement learning are presented for quantum robot. The theoretic results show that quantum robot can reduce the complexity of O(N^2) in traditional robot to O(N^(3/2)) using quantum searching algorithm, and the simulation results demonstrate that quantum robot is also superior to traditional robot in efficient learning by novel quantum reinforcement learning algorithm. Considering the advantages of quantum robot, its some potential important applications are also analyzed and prospected.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, 2 table