Diversity-aware social robots meet people: beyond context-aware embodied AI

The article introduces the concept of "diversity-aware" robotics and discusses the need to develop computational models to embed robots with diversity-awareness: that is, robots capable of adapting and re-configuring their behavior to recognize, respect, and value the uniqueness of the person they interact with to promote inclusion regardless of their age, race, gender, cognitive or physical capabilities, etc. Finally, the article discusses possible technical solutions based on Ontologies and Bayesian Networks, starting from previous experience with culturally competent robots.Comment: The article has been presented during the Roundtable "AI in holistic care and healing practices: the caring encounter beyond COVID-19", Anthropology, AI and the Future of Human Society, 6-10 June 2022, Royal Anthropological Institut

The project PRISMA: Post-Disaster assessment with UAVs

In the context of emergency scenarios, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are extremely important instruments, in particular during monitoring tasks and in relation to the Post-Disaster assessment phase. The current paper describes a summary of the work performed during PRISMA [1], a project focused on the development and deployment of robots and autonomous systems able to operate in emergency scenarios, with a specific reference to monitoring and real-time intervention. Among other aspects, the investigation of strategies for mapping and for path following, for the implementation of Human-Swarm Interfaces and for the coverage of large areas have been performed, and they will be here summarized

Analysis of path following and obstacle avoidance for multiple wheeled robots in a shared workspace

The article presents the experimental evaluation of an integrated approach for path following and obstacle avoidance, implemented on wheeled robots. Wheeled robots are widely used in many different contexts, and they are usually required to operate in partial or total autonomy: in a wide range of situations, having the capability to follow a predetermined path and avoiding unexpected obstacles is extremely relevant. The basic requirement for an appropriate collision avoidance strategy is to sense or detect obstacles and make proper decisions when the obstacles are nearby. According to this rationale, the approach is based on the definition of the path to be followed as a curve on the plane expressed in its implicit form f(x, y) = 0, which is fed to a feedback controller for path following. Obstacles are modeled through Gaussian functions that modify the original function, generating a resulting safe path which - once again - is a curve on the plane expressed as f\u2032(x, y) = 0: the deformed path can be fed to the same feedback controller, thus guaranteeing convergence to the path while avoiding all obstacles. The features and performance of the proposed algorithm are confirmed by experiments in a crowded area with multiple unicycle-like robots and moving persons

Entropy Based Multi-robot Active SLAM

In this article, we present an efficient multi-robot active SLAM framework that involves a frontier-sharing method for maximum exploration of an unknown environment. It encourages the robots to spread into the environment while weighting the goal frontiers with the pose graph SLAM uncertainly and path entropy. Our approach works on a limited number of frontier points and weights the goal frontiers with a utility function that encapsulates both the SLAM and map uncertainties, thus providing an efficient and not computationally expensive solution. Our approach has been tested on publicly available simulation environments and on real robots. An accumulative 31% more coverage than similar state-of-the-art approaches has been obtained, proving the capability of our approach for efficient environment exploration.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure

Encoding guidelines for a culturally competent robot for elderly care

The functionalities and behaviours of socially assistive robots for the care of older people are usually defined by the robot’s designers with limited room for runtime adaptation to meet the preferences, expectations and needs of the assisted person. However, adaptation plays a crucial role for the robot’s acceptability and ultimately for its effectiveness. Culture, which deeply influences a person’s preferences and habits, can be viewed as an invaluable “enabling technology” to achieve such level of adaptation. This paper discusses how guidelines describing culturally competent assistive behaviours can be encoded in a robot to effectively tune its actions, gestures and words. The proposed system is implemented on a Pepper robot and tested with an Indian persona, whose habits and preferences the robot discovers and adapts to at runtime

Culturally-Competent Human-Robot Verbal Interaction

The article describes a system for culture-aware human-robot verbal interaction, that constitutes the basis for designing culturally-competent robots for health-care, i.e., robots able to autonomously re–configure their way of acting and speaking, when offering a service, to match the culture, customs, and etiquette of the person they are asstisting. The article shows how culture-aware verbal interaction is tightly related to cultural knowledge representation and acquisition, by describing the methodological and technological solutions adopted, and showing in details one of the preliminary experiments performed to design a culturally-competent robot

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

Post-disaster assessment with unmanned aerial vehicles: A survey on practical implementations and research approaches

In this paper, we provide a review of the principal aspects related to search & rescue (SAR) with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), with particular interest in the phase of post-disaster assessment (PDA). Some areas of interest related to this topic have been chosen for the analysis: the aerial platforms used in the field, multirobot software architectures, onboard sensors and simultaneous localization and mapping approaches, terrain coverage algorithms, autonomous navigation techniques, and human-swarm interfaces. All these aspects have been analyzed with respect to the state-of-the-art, and also in relation to the project PRISMA, which focuses on the development and deployment of robots and autonomous systems that can operate in emergency scenarios, with a specific reference to monitoring and real-time intervention

Studio numerico per funzionalizzazione chimica e drogaggio di transistori in grafene

Per quanto la tecnologia CMOS costituirà ancora per alcuni anni la linea guida per tutte le industrie del settore, nuovi materiali hanno catalizzato negli ultimi anni l'interesse della ricerca al fine di superare i limiti fisici caratteristici del silicio. Tra questi il grafene è senza dubbio uno dei più interessanti, unendo allo spessore atomico e alle dimensioni nanometriche, un'elevatissima conducibilità. Purtroppo l'assenza di gap tra la banda di valenza e quella di conduzione rende il materiale difficilmente utilizzabile per applicazioni digitali. Scopo del presente lavoro è stato proprio quello di valutare possibili soluzioni al problema, mediante funzionalizzazione chimica e drogaggio di nanoribbon in grafene. Nel primo capitolo è stata descritta la metodologia di calcolo utilizzata, consistente nel metodo tight-binding con l'ausilio del pacchetto software Gaussian 03, e l'applicazione di tale tecnica al caso di un piano infinito di grafene. Nel secondo si analizza il materiale più nel dettaglio, con particolare attenzione alle caratteristiche che rendono il grafene unico come semiconduttore. Il terzo capitolo è dedicato alle simulazioni effettuate per verificare l'effettiva incidenza sulle bande della funzionalizzazione con triossido di cromo e boro. Nel quarto capitolo sono analizzati gli effetti del confinamento sul gap, tramite la modellizzazione del grafene in nanoribbon. Infine viene mostrato il funzionamento di transistori a effetto di campo in grafene, valutando la possibilità concreta di utilizzare il materiale per scopi elettronici

A Feasibility Study of Culture-Aware Cloud Services for Conversational Robots

Cultural competence - i.e., the capability to adapt verbal and non-verbal interaction to the user's cultural background - may be a key element for social robots to increase the user experience. However, designing and implementing culturally competent social robots is a complex task, given that advanced conversational skills are required. In this context, Cloud services may be useful for helping robots in generating appropriate interaction patterns in a culture-aware manner. In this letter, we present the design and the implementation of the CARESSES Cloud, a set of robotic services aimed at endowing robots with cultural competence in verbal interaction. A preliminary evaluation of the Cloud services as a general dialoguing system for culture-aware social robots has been performed, analyzing the feasibility of the architecture in terms of communication and data processing delays