ExCITE project: A review of forty-two months of robotic telepresence technology evolution

This article reports on the EU project ExCITE with specific focus on the technical development of the telepresence platform over a period of 42 months. The aim of the project was to assess the robustness and validity of the mobile robotic telepresence (MRP) system Giraff as a means to support elderly people and to foster their social interaction and participation. Embracing the idea of user-centered product refinement, the robot was tested over long periods of time in real homes. As such, the system development was driven by a strong involvement of elderly people and their caregivers but also by technical challenges associated with deploying the robot in real-world contexts. The results of the 42-months’ long evaluation is a system suitable for use in homes rather than a generic system suitable, for example, in office environments

TERESA: A Socially Intelligent Semi-autonomous Telepresence System

TERESA is a socially intelligent semi-autonomous telepresence system that is currently being developed as part of an FP7-STREP project funded by the European Union. The ultimate goal of the project is to deploy this system in an elderly day centre to allow elderly people to participate in social events even when they are unable to travel to the centre. In this paper, we present an overview of our progress on TERESA. We discuss the most significant scientific and technical challenges including: understanding and automati-cally recognizing social behaviour; defining social norms for the interaction between a telepresence robot and its users; navigating the environment while taking into account social features and constraints; and learning to estimate the social impact of the robot’s actions from multiple sources of feedback. We report on our current progress on each of these chal-lenges, as well as our plans for future work