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

Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey

With growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments, the ability of such systems to perceive, understand and anticipate human behavior becomes increasingly important. Specifically, predicting future positions of dynamic agents and planning considering such predictions are key tasks for self-driving vehicles, service robots and advanced surveillance systems. This paper provides a survey of human motion trajectory prediction. We review, analyze and structure a large selection of work from different communities and propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods based on the motion modeling approach and level of contextual information used. We provide an overview of the existing datasets and performance metrics. We discuss limitations of the state of the art and outline directions for further research.Comment: Submitted to the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 37 page

Which activities threaten independent living of elderly when becoming problematic : inspiration for meaningful service robot functionality

Purpose: In light of the increasing elderly population and the growing demand for home care, the potential of robot support is given increasing attention. In this paper, an inventory of activities was made that threaten independent living of elderly when becoming problematic. Results will guide the further development of an existing service robot, the Care-O-bot®. Method: A systematic literature search of PubMed was performed, focused on the risk factors for institutionalization. Additionally, focus group sessions were conducted in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and France. In these focus group sessions, problematic activities threatening the independence of elderly people were discussed. Three separate target groups were included in the focus group sessions: (1) elderly persons (n = 41), (2) formal caregivers (n = 40) and (3) informal caregivers (n = 32). Results: Activities within the International Classification of Functioning domains mobility, self-care, and interpersonal interaction and relationships were found to be the most problematic. Conclusions: A distinct set of daily activities was identified that may threaten independent living, but no single activity could be selected as the main activity causing a loss of independence as it is often a combination of problematic activities that is person-specific. Supporting the problematic activities need not involve a robotic solution Read More: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/17483107.2013.840861Peer reviewe

Social Situatedness: Vygotsky and Beyond

The concept of ‘social situatedness’, i.e. the idea that the development of individual intelligence requires a social (and cultural) embedding, has recently received much attention in cognitive science and artificial intelligence research. The work of Lev Vygotsky who put forward this view already in the 1920s has influenced the discussion to some degree, but still remains far from well known. This paper therefore aims to give an overview of his cognitive development theory and discuss its relation to more recent work in primatology and socially situated artificial intelligence, in particular humanoid robotics

Socially Aware Motion Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning

For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to humans, socially compliant navigation is still difficult to quantify due to the stochasticity in people's behaviors. Existing works are mostly focused on using feature-matching techniques to describe and imitate human paths, but often do not generalize well since the feature values can vary from person to person, and even run to run. This work notes that while it is challenging to directly specify the details of what to do (precise mechanisms of human navigation), it is straightforward to specify what not to do (violations of social norms). Specifically, using deep reinforcement learning, this work develops a time-efficient navigation policy that respects common social norms. The proposed method is shown to enable fully autonomous navigation of a robotic vehicle moving at human walking speed in an environment with many pedestrians.Comment: 8 page

Decision-Theoretic Planning with Person Trajectory Prediction for Social Navigation

Robots navigating in a social way should reason about people intentions when acting. For instance, in applications like robot guidance or meeting with a person, the robot has to consider the goals of the people. Intentions are inherently nonobservable, and thus we propose Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) as a decision-making tool for these applications. One of the issues with POMDPs is that the prediction models are usually handcrafted. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques to build prediction models from observations. A novel technique is employed to discover points of interest (goals) in the environment, and a variant of Growing Hidden Markov Models (GHMMs) is used to learn the transition probabilities of the POMDP. The approach is applied to an autonomous telepresence robot

Post-Turing Methodology: Breaking the Wall on the Way to Artificial General Intelligence

This article offers comprehensive criticism of the Turing test and develops quality criteria for new artificial general intelligence (AGI) assessment tests. It is shown that the prerequisites A. Turing drew upon when reducing personality and human consciousness to “suitable branches of thought” re-flected the engineering level of his time. In fact, the Turing “imitation game” employed only symbolic communication and ignored the physical world. This paper suggests that by restricting thinking ability to symbolic systems alone Turing unknowingly constructed “the wall” that excludes any possi-bility of transition from a complex observable phenomenon to an abstract image or concept. It is, therefore, sensible to factor in new requirements for AI (artificial intelligence) maturity assessment when approaching the Tu-ring test. Such AI must support all forms of communication with a human being, and it should be able to comprehend abstract images and specify con-cepts as well as participate in social practices