CARE: cooperation of AI-robot enablers to create a vibrant society

Demographic changes in our society are putting a heavy burden on care facilities and health-care infrastructure. While the elderly population is steadily increasing, there is an acute shortage of caregiving experts and professionals. This problem is becoming more severe in superaging societies, namely, Japan. Hence, this urges new and practical solutions for welfare facilities to mitigate the burden on caregivers and human supporting partners by introducing robotics assistance through information and communication technology (ICT). In this work, we present a new multirobot cooperation and coordination framework at different intellectual computation levels for care facilities. The framework is developed to bring the health-care 4.0 concept one step closer to reality, under the ongoing project “Moonshot Research & Development,” in Japan. First, we present an Internet of Things (IoT) integration system that is designed to include different passive and active assistive robots. Then, we redesign robot systems and develop a semiautonomous platform that can perform tasks based on user/patient interaction in real-world care facility scenarios. Our framework provides human–robot interaction under shared autonomy between the user and assisting robots to improve the efficacy of the users in everyday tasks. Tohoku University’s new state-of-the-art Living Lab facility is used to prepare a real-world scenario, where we present our experimental results. We also discuss the open problems in future care and human assistance aspects

Immersive virtual walking system using an avatar robot

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has enforced governments across the world to impose social restrictions on the movement of people and confined them to their homes to avoid the spread of the disease. This not only forbids them from leaving their homes but also greatly reduces their physical activities. This situation has brought attention to virtual technologies such as virtual tours or telepresence robots. While these technologies allow people to remotely participate in activities, it does not address the problem of reduction in physical activities due to the pandemic. In this paper, we propose a telepresence robotic system driven by the user's gait to provide an immersive virtual walking experience in remote locations. To this end, we developed a control interface consisting of an automated treadmill that adjusts its speed to the user's pace automatically. This interface is used to control an avatar robot that sends a 360-degree live image back to the user for visual feedback. We conducted an evaluation experiment to compare the experience using the proposed system in two different conditions to that of regular walking. The results indicated that the proposed system gives an immersive and realistic virtual walking experience while demanding physical effort from the user