The intelligent room for elderly care

Daily life assistance for elderly is one of the most promising and interesting scenarios for advanced technologies in the present and near future. Improving the quality of life of elderly is also some of the first priorities in modern countries and societies where the percentage of elder people is rapidly increasing due mainly to great improvements in medicine during the last decades. In this paper, we present an overview of our informationally structured room that supports daily life activities of elderly. Our environment contains different distributed sensors including a floor sensing system and several intelligent cabinets. Sensor information is sent to a centralized management system which processes the data and makes it available to a service robot which assists the people in the room. One important restriction in our intelligent environment is to maintain a small number of sensors to avoid interfering with the daily activities of people and to reduce as much as possible the invasion of their privacy. In addition we discuss some experiments using our real environment and robot

An informationally structured room for robotic assistance

The application of assistive technologies for elderly people is one of the most promising and interesting scenarios for intelligent technologies in the present and near future. Moreover, the improvement of the quality of life for the elderly is one of the first priorities in modern countries and societies. In this work, we present an informationally structured room that is aimed at supporting the daily life activities of elderly people. This room integrates different sensor modalities in a natural and non-invasive way inside the environment. The information gathered by the sensors is processed and sent to a centralized management system, which makes it available to a service robot assisting the people. One important restriction of our intelligent room is reducing as much as possible any interference with daily activities. Finally, this paper presents several experiments and situations using our intelligent environment in cooperation with our service robot. © 2015 by the authors

Floor Sensing System Using Laser Reflectivity for Localizing Everyday Objects and Robot

This paper describes a new method of measuring the position of everyday objects and a robot on the floor using distance and reflectance acquired by laser range finder (LRF). The information obtained by this method is important for a service robot working in a human daily life environment. Our method uses only one LRF together with a mirror installed on the wall. Moreover, since the area of sensing is limited to a LRF scanning plane parallel to the floor and just a few centimeters above the floor, the scanning covers the whole room with minimal invasion of privacy of a resident, and occlusion problem is mitigated by using mirror. We use the reflection intensity and position information obtained from the target surface. Although it is not possible to identify all objects by additionally using reflection values, it would be easier to identify unknown objects if we can eliminate easily identifiable objects by reflectance. In addition, we propose a method for measuring the robot’s pose using the tag which has the encoded reflection pattern optically identified by the LRF. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method

サービスロボットのための環境情報構造化プラットフォームに関する実証研究

主1情報知能工

High-precision three-dimensional laser measurement system by cooperative multiple mobile robots

Abstract-This paper presents a high-precision threedimensional laser measurement system of an architectural structure by cooperative multiple mobile robots. This system is composed of three mobile robots, that is, a parent robot and two child robots. The parent robot is equipped with a three-dimensional laser scanner, attitude sensor, total station, and auto-leveling device. On the other hand, the child robots are equipped with six corner mirrors. The parent robot moves and stops repeatedly, and measures a three-dimensional architectural shape using the equipped laser scanner at several positions. Meanwhile, the child robots also move and stop alternately, and act as mobile landmarks for the positioning of the parent robot. By replacing or newly installing several devices/mechanisms, the precision of the proposed system becomes incomparably higher than our previous system. We report the system achieves quite high accuracy of 0.03 0.05 % of targets' size through indoor/outdoor experiments. We apply the proposed technique for the shape measurement system of tunnels under construction and verify that the accuracy of the developed system is as high as a conventional ground-fixed laser scanner

Development of ROS-TMS 5.0 for informationally structured environment

Abstract An informationally structured environment (ISE) is a key technology for realizing service robots in daily life in the near future. In ISE, the information of the service robot and its surroundings is structured and provided to the robot on time and on demand. We started the development of a management system for ISE named TMS (Town Management System) in Robot Town Project in 2005. Since then we are continuing our efforts for the improvement of the performance and the enhancement of the functions of TMS. In this paper, we propose the latest system of TMS named ROS-TMS 5.0, which adopts ROS to utilize high scalability and rich resources of ROS. Next, we introduce the hardware platform of ISE called Big Sensor Box which incorporates various sensors under ROS-TMS management and operates service robots based on structured information. Robot service experiments including watching service of a care receiver, voice control of a communication robot and a robotic bed, and ing information by voice are also conducted in Big Sensor Box

Tract ablation after radiofrequency ablation to prevent viable tumor cell adhesion to the needle electrode

Purpose To evaluate whether the additive needle tract ablation (TA) can reduce adherent cells on the needle tract after radiofrequency ablation (RFA) in a preclinical HCC mouse model. Methods Hep3B-Luc cells were engrafted in the Balb/c-nude mice. Nineteen mice were randomly assigned into three groups: the needle only group (needle placement only without performing RFA), the RFA only group (needle placement with active RFA treatment), and the RFA-TA group (needle placement with active RFA treatment and additive tract ablation). The 17-gauge needle with a 10-mm active tip was used. After RFA and TA, the viability of adherent tumor cells on the RFA needle was evaluated with bioluminescence imaging (BLI) and live-cell counting. Results We observed that RFA-TA group had the lowest BLI values compared with other groups (needle only group, 11.2 ± 6.4 million; RFA only group, 13.6 ± 9.1 million; RFA-TA group, 1.11 ± 0.8 million, p = 0.001). Live cell counting with acridine orange/propidium iodide staining also confirmed that the counted viable cell numbers in RFA-TA group were lowest compared to the other groups (needle only group, 14.8 ± 4.5; RFA only group, 643.8 ± 131.9; RFA-TA group, 1.5 ± 0.9, p < 0.001). Conclusions The additive tract ablation can significantly reduce the number of viable tumor cells adherent to the RFA needle, which can prevent needle tract seeding after RFA procedure