Alle Publikationen
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2020
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(2020): A Holistic Approach to Behavior Adaptation for Socially Assistive Robots. In: International Journal of Social Robotics, S. 617-637. DOI: 10.1007/s12369-019-00617-9
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-019-00617-9 Abstract: Socially assistive robotics aims at providing users with continuous support and personalized assistance, through appropriate social interactions. The design of robots capable of supporting people in heterogeneous tasks, raises several challenges among which the most relevant are the need to realise intelligent and continuous behaviours, robustness and flexibility of services and, furthermore, the ability to adapt to different contexts and needs. Artificial intelligence plays a key role in realizing cognitive capabilities like e.g., learning, context reasoning or planning that are highly needed in socially assistive robots. The integration of several of such capabilities is an open problem. This paper proposes a novel “cognitive approach” integrating ontology-based knowledge reasoning, automated planning and execution technologies. The core idea is to endow assistive robots with intelligent features in order to reason at different levels of abstraction, understand specific health-related needs and decide how to act in order to perform personalized assistive tasks. The paper presents such a cognitive approach pointing out the contribution of different knowledge contexts and perspectives, presents detailed functioning traces to show adaptation and personalization features, and finally discusses an experimental assessment proving the feasibility of the approach.
2019
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(2019) : A Layered Architecture for Socially Assistive Robotics as a Service: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC): 2019 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC): Bari, Italy: 10/6/2019 - 10/9/2019: [Piscataway, NJ]: IEEE, S. 352-357
Abstract: Socially assistive robotics technology is expected to play a crucial role in supporting home patients with neurological disorders. Nevertheless, the adoption of such technology in real home environments is still far to be reached since it presents several challenges mainly related to its acceptance in the everyday life. In this domain, a high degree of personalization is required usually obtained by a customization of a robotic system with respect to specific assistive tasks. On the contrary, socially assistive robots are usually general-purpose platforms requiring a considerable effort for customization. In this work, to limit static and costly customization of robotic systems, a service-oriented approach is adopted to represent and manage assistive tasks to be performed by a social robotic system, allowing to decouple a given functionality from its concrete implementation that can be provided by different devices and with different execution modalities. The service-oriented approach for robotics applications, known as Robot-as-a-Service, is becoming attractive for decoupling the robot hardware from the functionalities it provides.
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(2019): Understanding of Human Behavior with a Robotic Agent Through Daily Activity Analysis. In: International Journal of Social Robotics 11 (3), S. 437-462. DOI: 10.1007/s12369-019-00513-2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-019-00513-2 Abstract: Personal assistive robots to be realized in the near future should have the ability to seamlessly coexist with humans in unconstrained environments, with the robot’s capability to understand and interpret the human behavior during human–robot cohabitation significantly contributing towards this end. Still, the understanding of human behavior through a robot is a challenging task as it necessitates a comprehensive representation of the high-level structure of the human’s behavior from the robot’s low-level sensory input. The paper at hand tackles this problem by demonstrating a robotic agent capable of apprehending human daily activities through a method, the Interaction Unit analysis, that enables activities’ decomposition into a sequence of units, each one associated with a behavioral factor. The modelling of human behavior is addressed with a Dynamic Bayesian Network that operates on top of the Interaction Unit, offering quantification of the behavioral factors and the formulation of the human’s behavioral model. In addition, light-weight human action and object manipulation monitoring strategies have been developed, based on RGB-D and laser sensors, tailored for onboard robot operation. As a proof of concept, we used our robot to evaluate the ability of the method to differentiate among the examined human activities, as well as to assess the capability of behavior modeling of people with Mild Cognitive Impairment. Moreover, we deployed our robot in 12 real house environments with real users, showcasing the behavior understanding ability of our method in unconstrained realistic environments. The evaluation process revealed promising performance and demonstrated that human behavior can be automatically modeled through Interaction Unit analysis, directly from robotic agents.
2016
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(2016): Accessible Robots for Improving Social Skills of Individuals with Autism. In: Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing Research 6 (4). DOI: 10.1515/jaiscr-2016-0020
Abstract: This paper reports on an ongoing project between members of the computer science and special education departments of Bradley University and Murray State University, detailing the robotic platforms developed and investigated as a potential tool to improve social interactions among individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Development of a fourth generation robotic agent is described, which uses economically available robotic platforms (Lego NXT) as Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR), combined with direct instruction pedagogy and social scripts to support an alternative educational approach to teaching social behavior. Specifically, in this fourth generation, changes to the physical design of the robots were made to improve the maintainability, reliability, maneuverability, and aesthetics of the robots. The software architecture was designed for modularity, configurability, and reusability of the software.
Keywords: Assitive technology, Autism, Autism spectrum disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), Interaktion, interdisziplinär, Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation, Mensch-Technik-Relationen (MTR), Pathologie, Realtechnik, robot teacher, script, Serviceroboter, Social robotic, Social Skills, Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR), Soziale Robotik, Soziosensitive Systeme, teaching social behaviour, Technik, Telemanipulation, Telerobotics
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