59,924 research outputs found
Externalising moods and psychological states in a cloud based system to enhance a pet-robot and child’s interaction
Background:This PATRICIA research project is about using pet robots to reduce pain
and anxiety in hospitalized children. The study began 2 years ago and it is believed that
the advances made in this project are significant. Patients, parents, nurses, psycholo-
gists, and engineers have adopted the Pleo robot, a baby dinosaur robotic pet, which
works in different ways to assist children during hospitalization.
Methods: Focus is spent on creating a wireless communication system with the Pleo
in order to help the coordinator, who conducts therapy with the child, monitor, under-
stand, and control Pleo’s behavior at any moment. This article reports how this techno-
logical function is being developed and tested.
Results: Wireless communication between the Pleo and an Android device is
achieved. The developed Android app allows the user to obtain any state of the robot
without stopping its interaction with the patient. Moreover, information is sent to a
cloud, so that robot moods, states and interactions can be shared among different
robots.
Conclusions: Pleo attachment was successful for more than 1 month, working with
children in therapy, which makes the investment capable of positive therapeutic
possibilities. This technical improvement in the Pleo addresses two key issues in social
robotics: needing an enhanced response to maintain the attention and engagement of
the child, and using the system as a platform to collect the states of the child’s progress
for clinical purposes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Narrative Generation in Entertainment: Using Artificial Intelligence Planning
From the field of artificial intelligence (AI) there is a growing stream of technology capable of being embedded in software that will reshape the way we interact with our environment in our everyday lives. This ‘AI software’ is often used to tackle more mundane tasks that are otherwise dangerous or meticulous for a human to accomplish. One particular area, explored in this paper, is for AI software to assist in supporting the enjoyable aspects of the lives of humans. Entertainment is one of these aspects, and often includes storytelling in some form no matter what the type of media, including television, films, video games, etc. This paper aims to explore the ability of AI software to automate the story-creation and story-telling process. This is part of the field of Automatic Narrative Generator (ANG), which aims to produce intuitive interfaces to support people (without any previous programming experience) to use tools to generate stories, based on their ideas of the kind of characters, intentions, events and spaces they want to be in the story. The paper includes details of such AI software created by the author that can be downloaded and used by the reader for this purpose. Applications of this kind of technology include the automatic generation of story lines for ‘soap operas’
Relational Approach to Knowledge Engineering for POMDP-based Assistance Systems as a Translation of a Psychological Model
Assistive systems for persons with cognitive disabilities (e.g. dementia) are
difficult to build due to the wide range of different approaches people can
take to accomplishing the same task, and the significant uncertainties that
arise from both the unpredictability of client's behaviours and from noise in
sensor readings. Partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) models
have been used successfully as the reasoning engine behind such assistive
systems for small multi-step tasks such as hand washing. POMDP models are a
powerful, yet flexible framework for modelling assistance that can deal with
uncertainty and utility. Unfortunately, POMDPs usually require a very labour
intensive, manual procedure for their definition and construction. Our previous
work has described a knowledge driven method for automatically generating POMDP
activity recognition and context sensitive prompting systems for complex tasks.
We call the resulting POMDP a SNAP (SyNdetic Assistance Process). The
spreadsheet-like result of the analysis does not correspond to the POMDP model
directly and the translation to a formal POMDP representation is required. To
date, this translation had to be performed manually by a trained POMDP expert.
In this paper, we formalise and automate this translation process using a
probabilistic relational model (PRM) encoded in a relational database. We
demonstrate the method by eliciting three assistance tasks from non-experts. We
validate the resulting POMDP models using case-based simulations to show that
they are reasonable for the domains. We also show a complete case study of a
designer specifying one database, including an evaluation in a real-life
experiment with a human actor
An Evaluation Schema for the Ethical Use of Autonomous Robotic Systems in Security Applications
We propose a multi-step evaluation schema designed to help procurement agencies and others to examine the ethical dimensions of autonomous systems to be applied in the security sector, including autonomous weapons systems
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