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

Detection of Interaction-based Knowledge for Reclassification of Service Robots: Big Data Analytics Perspective

With the advancement of artificial intelligence technology, the robot industry in human- robot interactive service has rapidly developed. The purpose of this paper is to uncover user acceptance of human-robot interactive service robots based on online reviews. Extract reviews the public service robots and the domestic service robots from YouTube uses word2vec, sentiment classification, and LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) analysis methods for research. The results show that in the interactive technology, the public service robots, the domestic service robots, and the service robots can well receive the user’s speech, gestures, and understanding of emotional states and navigating with and around. However, collaborating with humans, users may be more fearful and worried. At the same time, the positive topic of the public service robots is experience value, and the negative topic is system quality. The positive topic of the domestic service robots is anthropomorphism, and the negative topic is perceived intelligence

Robust Spoken Language Understanding for House Service Robots

Service robotics has been growing significantly in thelast years, leading to several research results and to a numberof consumer products. One of the essential features of theserobotic platforms is represented by the ability of interactingwith users through natural language. Spoken commands canbe processed by a Spoken Language Understanding chain, inorder to obtain the desired behavior of the robot. The entrypoint of such a process is represented by an Automatic SpeechRecognition (ASR) module, that provides a list of transcriptionsfor a given spoken utterance. Although several well-performingASR engines are available off-the-shelf, they operate in a generalpurpose setting. Hence, they may be not well suited in therecognition of utterances given to robots in specific domains. Inthis work, we propose a practical yet robust strategy to re-ranklists of transcriptions. This approach improves the quality of ASRsystems in situated scenarios, i.e., the transcription of roboticcommands. The proposed method relies upon evidences derivedby a semantic grammar with semantic actions, designed tomodel typical commands expressed in scenarios that are specificto human service robotics. The outcomes obtained throughan experimental evaluation show that the approach is able toeffectively outperform the ASR baseline, obtained by selectingthe first transcription suggested by the AS

The Tendency of Development and Application of Service Robots for Defense, Rescue and Security

The development of sensor, information and communication technology, or new technology, has contributed to the development of robot technology. A new generation of service robots has been developed, and the highest number of their practical applications is for defense and security. Progress and development of information technology, sensor technology and servo-drive is responsible for the development of over 600 different types or prototype service robots. Service robots are designed for professional jobs and service jobs that are used in everyday life. The rapid development of computer management enabled the rapid development of various service robots that can move independently, autonomously exchange information with their surroundings and act completely autonomously (UV Unmanned Vehicles - vehicles that operate autonomously without human management). They can be used in all operating conditions on land, air and water, which is most important for the development of service robots for defense and security. Different applications of service robots for defense and security have been developed, and some are described in the paper, as well as the tendency of their application in the recent years. A large number of service robots for defense and security were developed, which are used for obtaining information about the vulnerability of human populations during earthquakes, fires or military activities. After obtaining information, we can make proper decisions that will serve the purpose of rescue and assistance to the ones in danger. The tendency of application of service robots for security and defense is constantly rising in the past few years. It is estimated that the development of sophisticated service robots for defense, rescue and security will continue in the future, and the number of applications will increase

Service robots, customers and service employees: what can we learn from the academic literature and where are the gaps?

Purpose – Robots are predicted to have a profound impact on the service sector. The emergence of robots has attracted increasing interest from business scholars and practitioners alike. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of the business literature about the impact of service robots on customers and employees with the objective of guiding future research. Design/methodology/approach – We analyzed the literature on service robots as they relate to customers and employees in business journals listed in the Financial Times top 50 journals plus all journals covered in the cross-disciplinary SERVSIG literature alerts. Findings – The analysis of the identified studies yielded multiple observations about the impact of service robots on customers (e.g., overarching frameworks on acceptance and usage of service robots; characteristics of service robots and anthropomorphism; and potential for enhanced and deteriorated service experiences) and service employees (e.g., employee benefits such as reduced routine work, enhanced productivity and job satisfaction; potential negative consequences such as loss of autonomy and a range of negative psychological outcomes; opportunities for human-robot collaboration; job insecurity; and robot-related upskilling and development requirements). We also conclude that current research on service robots is fragmented, is largely conceptual in nature, and focused on the initial adoption stage. We feel that more research is needed to build an overarching theory. In addition, more empirical research is needed, especially on the long(er)-term usage service robots on actual behaviors, the well-being, and potential downsides and (ethical) risks for customers and service employees.Research limitations – Our review focused on the business and service literature. Future work may want to include additional literature streams, including those in computer science, engineering, and information systems.Originality/value – This article is the first to synthesize the business and service literature on the impact of service robots on customers and employees.</div

Multisensor-based human detection and tracking for mobile service robots

The one of fundamental issues for service robots is human-robot interaction. In order to perform such a task and provide the desired services, these robots need to detect and track people in the surroundings. In the present paper, we propose a solution for human tracking with a mobile robot that implements multisensor data fusion techniques. The system utilizes a new algorithm for laser-based legs detection using the on-board LRF. The approach is based on the recognition of typical leg patterns extracted from laser scans, which are shown to be very discriminative also in cluttered environments. These patterns can be used to localize both static and walking persons, even when the robot moves. Furthermore, faces are detected using the robot's camera and the information is fused to the legs position using a sequential implementation of Unscented Kalman Filter. The proposed solution is feasible for service robots with a similar device configuration and has been successfully implemented on two different mobile platforms. Several experiments illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing that robust human tracking can be performed within complex indoor environments