Raffaele Limosani

Development of a Socially Believable Multi-Robot Solution from Town to Home

Abstract Technological advances in the robotic and ICT fields represent an effective solution to address specific societal problems to support ageing and independent life. One of the key factors for these technologies is that they have to be socially acceptable and believable to the end-users. This paper aimed to present some technological aspects that have been faced to develop the Robot-Era system, a multi-robotic system that is able to act in a socially believable way in the environments daily inhabited by humans, such as urban areas, buildings and homes. In particular, this paper focuses on two services—shopping delivery and garbage collection—showing preliminary results on experiments conducted with 35 elderly people. The analysis adopts an end-user-oriented perspective, considering some of the main attributes of acceptability: usability, attitude, anxiety, trust and quality of life.

Improving Domiciliary Robotic Services by Integrating the ASTRO Robot in an AmI Infrastructure

This work describes the ECHORD Experiment ASTROMOBILE, a project aimed to design, develop and test a system for favourable independent living, improved quality of life and efficiency of care for senior citizens in domestic environments. The system, composed of a mobile robotic platform (called ASTRO) and an Ambient Intelligent Infrastructure that actively cooperated between them and with the end-user, was designed and implemented with a user-centred design approach, involving different stakeholders. The system was designed to deliver services to users, like drug delivery, stand support, reminding, info-entertainment. The design took advantages of the integration of robotic platforms with smart environments, to provide to users higher quality and localization based services. Senior end-users were involved in the experimentation of the system in the DomoCasa Living Lab and feedbacks were gathered for the technology assessment. Particularly, this paper demonstrates the general feasibility of the ASTROMOBILE system and thanks to users feedbacks its acceptability and usability.

Enabling Global Robot Navigation Based on a Cloud Robotics Approach

In the future, social robots will permeate our daily life. An autonomous robot that has to move among different buildings needs to manage huge amount of data, as a consequence it is clear that the configuration of the navigation system becomes hard to manage. This paper presents a system, based on a cloud robotics paradigm, conceived to allow autonomous robots to navigate in indoor environment, which are not known a priori. The environment is divided into sub-maps and all the necessary information and the topological representation of the world, are stored into a remote cloud infrastructure. By means of specific environmental tags, composed of a set of ARTags and QR codes, the robot gets the access to the cloud service and it is able to update its navigation configuration in a dynamic and automatic way. Experiments have been conducted in order to choose an appropriate marker dimension and to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed procedure.

Two-person activity recognition using skeleton data

Human activity recognition is an important and active field of research having a wide range of applications in numerous fields including ambient-assisted living (AL). Although most of the researches are focused on the single user, the ability to recognise two-person interactions is perhaps more important for its social implications. This study presents a two-person activity recognition system that uses skeleton data extracted from a depth camera. The human actions are encoded using a set of a few basic postures obtained with an unsupervised clustering approach. Multiclass support vector machines are used to build models on the training set, whereas the X-means algorithm is employed to dynamically find the optimal number of clusters for each sample during the classification phase. The system is evaluated on the Institute of Systems and Robotics (ISR) - University of Lincoln (UoL) and Stony Brook University (SBU) datasets, reaching overall accuracies of 0.87 and 0.88, respectively. Although the results show that the performances of the system are comparable with the state of the art, recognition improvements are obtained with the activities related to health-care environments, showing promise for applications in the AL realm.

Use Case Evaluation of a Cloud Robotics Teleoperation System (Short Paper)

The paper describes a generic Cloud Robotics teleoperation system which allows to control in real-time a robot (connected with a 4G network) having its video stream as feedback. The proposed system relies on the Azure Cloud Platform and on recent web technologies. Particularly, we present an use case experiment in which an operator in Slovakia controls a robot situated in Italy in order to evaluate its realtime feasibility. We test the system to assess its performances providing the throughput value of the communication and the average delay between consecutive received packets on both robot and teleoperation side. Additionally, regarding the video streaming, we test several packet sizes to establish a suitable image quality. The results show how the chosen technology allows to have real-time performances in terms of video and velocity commands streaming.

Enhancing Human Robot Interaction Through Social Network Interfaces: A Case Study

Recently we have assisted to the rise of different Social Networks, and to the growth of robots for home applications, which represent the second big market opportunity. The use and the integration of robotics services in our daily life is strictly correlated with their usability and their acceptability. Particularly, their ease of use, among other issues, is linked to the simplicity of the interface the user has to interact with. In this sense social networks could enrich and simplify the communication between the user and technology avoiding the multiplication of custom interfaces. In this work the authors propose a system to enHancE human RobOt Interaction through common Social networks (HeROIS). HeROIS system combines the use of cloud resources, service robot and smart environments proposing three different services to help citizens in daily life. In order to assess the acceptability and the usability levels, HeROIS system and services have been tested with 13 real users (24–37 years old) in the DomoCasa Lab (Italy). As regards the usability, the results show that the proposed system is usable for 4 participants (30.77 % M = 79.69 SD = 3.13) and excellent for 9 participants (69.23 % M = 90.05 SD = 3.72). Concerning the acceptability level, the results show that the proposed system is acceptable for 8 volunteers (61.54 % M = 77.02 SD = 4.23) and excellent for 5 participants (38.46 % M = 89.71 SD = 6.06).

Long-term human affordance maps

This paper presents a work on mapping the use of space by humans in long periods of time. Daily geometric maps with the same coordinate frame were generated with SLAM, and in a similar manner, daily affordance density maps (places people use) were generated with the output of a human tracker running on the robot. The contribution of the paper is two-fold: an approach to detect geometric changes to cluster them in similar geometric configurations and the building of geometric and affordance composite maps on each cluster. This approach avoids the loss of long term retrieved information. Geometric similarity was computed using a normal distance approach on the maps. The analysis was performed on data collected by a mobile robot for a period of 4 months accumulating data equivalent to 70 days. Experimental results show that the system is capable of detecting geometric changes in the environment and clustering similar geometric configurations.

Connecting ROS and FIWARE: Concepts and Tutorial

Nowadays, the Cloud technology permeates our daily life, spread in various services and applications used by modern instruments, such as smartphones, computer, and IoT devices. Besides, the robotic field represents one of the future emerging markets. Nevertheless, these two distinct worlds seem to be very far from each other, due to the lack of common strategies and standards. The aim of this tutorial chapter is to provide a walkthrough to build a basic Cloud Robotics application using ROS and the FIWARE Cloud framework. At the beginning, the chapter offers step-by-step instructions to create and manage an Orion Context Broker running on a virtual machine. Then, the firos package is used to integrate the ROS topic communication using publishers and subscribers, providing a clear example. Finally, a more concrete use case is detailed, developing a Cloud Robotics application to control a ROS-based robot through the FIWARE framework. The code of the present tutorial is available at https://github.com/Raffa87/ROS_FIWARE_Tutorial, tested using ROS Indigo.

Robotic delivery service in combined outdoor–indoor environments: technical analysis and user evaluation

Abstract Robotic solutions for delivery tasks in urban and unstructured areas have represented a solid and considerable field of research in recent years. The aim of the proposed paper is to present the technical feasibility and usability of a robotic solution able to carry items from outdoor areas up to the user’s apartment and vice-versa. The proposed solution is based on three heterogeneous mobile platforms, working in three different environments (domestic, condominium, outdoor), able to cooperate among themselves and with other machines in the framework (i.e. the elevator of the condominium). The evaluation was performed in realistic environments involving 30 end-users.

Integration of Shared Autonomy System for Grasping Multiple Objects in the Domestic Environment

In recent years, autonomous robots have proven capable of solving tasks in complex 1 environments. In particular, robot manipulations in activities of daily living (ADL) for service robots 2 have been in wide use. However, manipulations such as loading a dishwasher or folding laundry are 3 difficult to automate robustly. In addition, manipulations of grasping multiple objects in domestic 4 environments present difficulty. To perform those applications better, we developed robotic systems 5 based on shared autonomy by combining the cognitive skills of a human operator with autonomous 6 robot behaviors. In this work, we present techniques for integration of a shared autonomy system 7 for assistive mobile manipulation and new strategies to support users in the domestic environment. 8 We demonstrate that the robot can grasp multiple objects with random size at known and unknown 9 table heights. Specifically, we developed three strategies for manipulation. From experimental 10 results, we observed that the first strategy has the highest success rate (70% for random objects) up 11 to 70 cm table height. Two other strategies perform better for 80 cm to 100 cm table height. The 12 success rate of the second and third strategies shows an average 63.3% and 73.3%, respectively, for 13 grasping random objects. We also demonstrated these strategies using two intuitive interfaces, a 14 visual interface in rviz and a voice user interface with speech recognition, which are suitable for 15 elderly people. In addition, the robot can select strategies automatically in random scenarios, which 16 make the robot intelligent and able to make decisions independently in the environment. We obtained 17 interesting results showing that the robot adapts to the environmental variation automatically. After 18 these experimental demonstrations, our robot shows the capabilities for employment in domestic 19 environments to perform actual tasks. 20