Knowledge representation for culturally competent personal robots: requirements, design principles, implementation, and assessment

Culture, intended as the set of beliefs, values, ideas, language, norms and customs which compose a person’s life, is an essential element to know by any robot for personal assistance. Culture, intended as that person’s background, can be an invaluable source of information to drive and speed up the process of discovering and adapting to the person’s habits, preferences and needs. This article discusses the requirements posed by cultural competence on the knowledge management system of a robot. We propose a framework for cultural knowledge representation that relies on (i) a three layer ontology for storing concepts of relevance, culture specific information and statistics, person-specific information and preferences; (ii) an algorithm for the acquisition of person-specific knowledge, which uses culture specific knowledge to drive the search; (iii) a Bayesian Network for speeding up the adaptation to the person by propagating the effects of acquiring one specific information onto interconnected concepts. We have conducted a preliminary evaluation of the framework involving 159 Italian and German volunteers and considering 122 among habits, attitudes and social norms

Collision-free navigation of multiple unicycle mobile robots

reserved3noWheeled Robots (WRs) are widely used in many different contexts, and usually they are required to operate in partial or total autonomy. In particular, in a wide range of situations, having the capability of following a predetermined path and avoiding unexpected obstacles can be extremely relevant. On these basis, this paper analyzes an integrated approach for path following and obstacle avoidance applied to unicycletype robots. The approach is based on the definition of the path to be followed as a curve f(x, y) in space, while obstacles are modeled as Gaussian functions that modify the original function, generating a resulting safe path. The attractiveness of this methodology which makes it look very simple, is that it neither requires the computation of a projection of the robot position on the path, nor does it need to consider a moving virtual target to be tracked. The performances of the proposed approach are analyzed by means of a series of experiments performed in dynamic environments with unicycle-Type robots.mixedmixedMuhammad Hassan Tanveer, ; Antonio, Sgorbissa; Carmine, RecchiutoTanveer, MUHAMMAD HASSAN; Sgorbissa, Antonio; Recchiuto, Carmin

Collaborative Development within a Social Robotic, Multi-Disciplinary Effort: Lesson Learnt from the CARESSES case study

In many cases, complex multidisciplinary research projects may show a lack of coordinated development and integration, and a big effort is often required in the final phase of the projects in order to merge software developed by heterogeneous research groups. This is particularly true in advanced robotic projects: the objective here is to deliver a system that integrates all the hardware and software components, is capable of autonomous behaviour, and needs to be deployed in realworld scenarios toward providing an impact on future research and, ultimately, on society. On the other hand, in recent years there has been a growing interest for techniques related to software integration, but these have been mostly applied to the IT commercial domain. This paper presents the work performed in the context of the project CARESSES, a multidisciplinary research project focusing on socially assistive robotics that involves 9 partners from the EU and Japan. Given the complexity of the project, a huge importance has been placed on software integration, task planning and architecture definition since the first stages of the work: to this aim, some of the practices commonly used in the commercial domain for software integration, such as merging software from the early stage, have been applied. As a case study, the document describes the steps which have been followed in the first year of the project discussing strengths and weaknesses of this approach