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

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

Social Roles and Baseline Proxemic Preferences for a Domestic Service Robot

© The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions, funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP7 215554, and partly funded by the ACCOMPANY project, a part of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement n287624The goal of our research is to develop socially acceptable behavior for domestic robots in a setting where a user and the robot are sharing the same physical space and interact with each other in close proximity. Specifically, our research focuses on approach distances and directions in the context of a robot handing over an object to a userPeer reviewe

On the Integration of Adaptive and Interactive Robotic Smart Spaces

© 2015 Mauro Dragone et al.. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)Enabling robots to seamlessly operate as part of smart spaces is an important and extended challenge for robotics R&D and a key enabler for a range of advanced robotic applications, such as AmbientAssisted Living (AAL) and home automation. The integration of these technologies is currently being pursued from two largely distinct view-points: On the one hand, people-centred initiatives focus on improving the user’s acceptance by tackling human-robot interaction (HRI) issues, often adopting a social robotic approach, and by giving to the designer and - in a limited degree – to the final user(s), control on personalization and product customisation features. On the other hand, technologically-driven initiatives are building impersonal but intelligent systems that are able to pro-actively and autonomously adapt their operations to fit changing requirements and evolving users’ needs,but which largely ignore and do not leverage human-robot interaction and may thus lead to poor user experience and user acceptance. In order to inform the development of a new generation of smart robotic spaces, this paper analyses and compares different research strands with a view to proposing possible integrated solutions with both advanced HRI and online adaptation capabilities.Peer reviewe

Designing Robots for Care: Care Centered Value-Sensitive Design

The prospective robots in healthcare intended to be included within the conclave of the nurse-patient relationship—what I refer to as care robots—require rigorous ethical reflection to ensure their design and introduction do not impede the promotion of values and the dignity of patients at such a vulnerable and sensitive time in their lives. The ethical evaluation of care robots requires insight into the values at stake in the healthcare tradition. What’s more, given the stage of their development and lack of standards provided by the International Organization for Standardization to guide their development, ethics ought to be included into the design process of such robots. The manner in which this may be accomplished, as presented here, uses the blueprint of the Value-sensitive design approach as a means for creating a framework tailored to care contexts. Using care values as the foundational values to be integrated into a technology and using the elements in care, from the care ethics perspective, as the normative criteria, the resulting approach may be referred to as care centered value-sensitive design. The framework proposed here allows for the ethical evaluation of care robots both retrospectively and prospectively. By evaluating care robots in this way, we may ultimately ask what kind of care we, as a society, want to provide in the futur

Conceptual spatial representations for indoor mobile robots

We present an approach for creating conceptual representations of human-made indoor environments using mobile robots. The concepts refer to spatial and functional properties of typical indoor environments. Following findings in cognitive psychology, our model is composed of layers representing maps at different levels of abstraction. The complete system is integrated in a mobile robot endowed with laser and vision sensors for place and object recognition. The system also incorporates a linguistic framework that actively supports the map acquisition process, and which is used for situated dialogue. Finally, we discuss the capabilities of the integrated system

An empirical framework for human-robot proxemics

The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects COGNIRON ("The Cognitive Robot Companion") and LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions) and was funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP6- 002020 and FP7-215554.An empirical framework for Human-Robot (HR) proxemics is proposed which shows how the measurement and control of interpersonal distances between a human and a robot can be potentially used by the robot to interpret, predict and manipulate proxemic behaviour for Human-Robot Interactions (HRIs). The proxemic framework provides for incorporation of inter-factor effects, and can be extended to incorporate new factors, updated values and results. The framework is critically discussed and future work proposed