Support for ECHONET-based smart home environments in the universAAL ecosystem

With the advent of information and communication technology, many Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions are being proposed to increase the quality of life of elderly people and reduce health and social care costs. Among these AAL solutions, universAAL seems to be the most promising platform for easy and economical development of AAL services. However, in its current state, the platform is incompatible with smart home systems which are based on the ECHONET standard. This paper presents the bridging between the universAAL and ECHONET standards through a technical point of view and thereby enables AAL services for ECHONET-based smart home environments

Adaptive Navigation Control for Swarms of Autonomous Mobile Robots

This paper was devoted to developing a new and general coordinated adaptive navigation scheme for large-scale mobile robot swarms adapting to geographically constrained environments. Our distributed solution approach was built on the following assumptions: anonymity, disagreement on common coordinate systems, no pre-selected leader, and no direct communication. The proposed adaptive navigation was largely composed of four functions, commonly relying on dynamic neighbor selection and local interaction. When each robot found itself what situation it was in, individual appropriate ranges for neighbor selection were defined within its limited sensing boundary and the robots properly selected their neighbors in the limited range. Through local interactions with the neighbors, each robot could maintain a uniform distance to its neighbors, and adapt their direction of heading and geometric shape. More specifically, under the proposed adaptive navigation, a group of robots could be trapped in a dead-end passage,but they merge with an adjacent group to emergently escape from the dead-end passage. Furthermore, we verified the effectiveness of the proposed strategy using our in-housesimulator. The simulation results clearly demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is a simple yet robust approach to autonomous navigation of robot swarms in highlyclutteredenvironments. Since our algorithm is local and completely scalable to any size, it is easily implementable on a wide variety of resource-constrained mobile robots andplatforms. Our adaptive navigation control for mobile robot swarms is expected to be used in many applications ranging from examination and assessment of hazardous environments to domestic applications

The CARESSES study protocol: testing and evaluating culturally competent socially assistive robots among older adults residing in long term care homes through a controlled experimental trial

Background : This article describes the design of an intervention study that focuses on whether and to what degree culturally competent social robots can improve health and well-being related outcomes among older adults residing long-term care homes. The trial forms the final stage of the international, multidisciplinary CARESSES project aimed at designing, developing and evaluating culturally competent robots that can assist older people according to the culture of the individual they are supporting. The importance of cultural competence has been demonstrated in previous nursing literature to be key towards improving health outcomes among patients. Method : This study employed a mixed-method, single-blind, parallel-group controlled before-and-after experimental trial design that took place in England and Japan. It aimed to recruit 45 residents of long-term care homes aged ≥65 years, possess sufficient cognitive and physical health and who self-identify with the English, Indian or Japanese culture (n = 15 each). Participants were allocated to either the experimental group, control group 1 or control group 2 (all n = 15). Those allocated to the experimental group or control group 1 received a Pepper robot programmed with the CARESSES culturally competent artificial intelligence (experimental group) or a limited version of this software (control group 1) for 18 h across 2 weeks. Participants in control group 2 did not receive a robot and continued to receive care as usual. Participants could also nominate their informal carer(s) to participate. Quantitative data collection occurred at baseline, after 1 week of use, and after 2 weeks of use with the latter time-point also including qualitative semi-structured interviews that explored their experience and perceptions further. Quantitative outcomes of interest included perceptions of robotic cultural competence, health-related quality of life, loneliness, user satisfaction, attitudes towards robots and caregiver burden. Discussion : This trial adds to the current preliminary and limited pool of evidence regarding the benefits of socially assistive robots for older adults which to date indicates considerable potential for improving outcomes. It is the first to assess whether and to what extent cultural competence carries importance in generating improvements to well-being

Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems : the 12th International Symposium

This volume of proceedings includes 32 original contributions presented at the 12th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2014), held in November 2014. The selected papers in this volume are authored by leading researchers from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, thereby providing a broad coverage and perspective of the state-of-the-art technologies, algorithms, system architectures, and applications in distributed robotic systems.

RFID-based mobile robot guidance to a stationary target

Retrieving accurate location information about an object in real-time, as well as any general information pertinent to the object, is a key to enabling a robot to perform a task in cluttered, dynamically changing environment. In this paper, we address a novel technique for the guidance of mobile robots to help them identify, locate, and approach a target in our daily environments. To this end, we propose a standard for the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems and develop a prototype that can be easily installed in existing mobile robots. Specifically, when an RF signal is transmitted from an RF transponder, the proposed RFID system reads the transponder-encoded data and simultaneously picks up the direction of the transponder using the received signal strength pattern. Based on the angle of signal arrival, we develop the guidance strategies that enable a robot to find its way to the transponder position. Moreover, to cope with multi-path reflection and unexpected distortions of the signals resulted from environmental effects, we present several algorithms for reconstructing the signals. We demonstrate that an off-the-self mobile robot equipped with the proposed system locates and approaches a stationary target object. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed system operating at a frequency of 315 MHz falls within a reasonable range in our normal office environment

Topology Graph Pruning for Optical Mapping Methods using Edge Betweenness Centrality

Optical mapping is one of the most widely used application areas of low-cost robotic platforms. These platforms are in favor as they are relatively easy to use, to operate and to maintain. Acquired optical data (in the form of video and/or image) are valuable sources of information for both online (e.g., navigation, localization, mapping, and others) and offline processes (scientific interpretations, change detection, mapping, and others). The amount of data acquired has been continuously growing thanks to the emerging capabilities of mobile platforms in terms of autonomy allowing longer surveying time. This increases the need for fast and efficient methods to process the obtained data. Creating optical 2D maps from acquired data is composed of mainly image matching, trajectory estimation (Global Alignment (GA)) and image blending steps. In this paper, we discuss the usage of Edge Betweenness Centrality (EBC) concept to reduce the total number of overlapping image pairs to be used in the GA step. EBC allows selecting the image pairs that play a relatively key role in the topology graph. We also discuss the usage of graph energy as a decision criterion during image mosaicing iterations. We present experiments with several datasets to show the performance of the proposed method

Adaptive Flocking of Robot Swarms: Algorithms and Properties

This paper presents a distributed approach for adaptive flocking of swarms of mobile robots that enables to navigate autonomously in complex environments populated with obstacles. Based on the observation of the swimming behavior of a school of fish, we propose an integrated algorithm that allows a swarm of robots to navigate in a coordinated manner, split into multiple swarms, or merge with other swarms according to the environment conditions. We prove the convergence of the proposed algorithm using Lyapunov stability theory. We also verify the effectiveness of the algorithm through extensive simulations, where a swarm of robots repeats the process of splitting and merging while passing around multiple stationary and moving obstacles. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is scalable, and robust to variations in the sensing capability of individual robots

Self-configurable mobile robot swarms with hole repair capability

We address the problem of deploying a swarm of autonomous mobile robots toward building an ad hoc network of robotic sensors with spatial uniform density. For the purpose, each of the robots configures themselves into an area with geographical constraints through local interactions with two adjacent neighboring robots. The basic idea underlying this work is that robots can be thought of as liquid particles that change their positions conforming to the shape of the container they occupy. The main challenge is how to cope with the accuracy limitations of sensors and possible holes in the configuration. Considering such realistic conditions, the convergence of the proposed method is proved using Lyapunovpsilas theorem. The proposed method is verified to be effective through the simulation for the secure deployments of robotic sensor network