This paper deals with the problem of detecting fallen people lying on the floor by means of a mobile robot equipped with a 3D depth sensor. In the proposed algorithm, inspired by semantic segmentation techniques, the 3D scene is over-segmented into small patches. Fallen people are then detected by means of two SVM classifiers: the first one labels each patch, while the second one captures the spatial relations between them. This novel approach showed to be robust and fast. Indeed, thanks to the use of small patches, fallen people in real cluttered scenes with objects side by side are correctly detected. Moreover, the algorithm can be executed on a mobile robot fitted with a standard laptop making it possible to exploit the 2D environmental map built by the robot and the multiple points of view obtained during the robot navigation. Additionally, this algorithm is robust to illumination changes since it does not rely on RGB data but on depth data. All the methods have been thoroughly validated on the IASLAB-RGBD Fallen Person Dataset, which is published online as a further contribution. It consists of several static and dynamic sequences with 15 different people and 2 different environments.
Mobile service robots have become increasingly ubiquitous. However, these robots can pose potential accessibility issues and safety concerns to people with visual impairments (PVI). We sought to explore the challenges faced by PVI around mainstream mobile service robots and identify their needs. Seventeen PVI were interviewed about their experiences with three emerging robots: vacuum robots, delivery robots, and drones. We comprehensively investigated PVI's robot experiences by considering their different roles around robots -- direct users and bystanders. Our study highlighted participants' c…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学）
The paper discusses how robots enable occupant-safe continuous protection for students when schools reopen. Conventionally, fixed air filters are not used as a key pandemic prevention method for public indoor spaces because they are unable to trap the airborne pathogens in time in the entire room. However, by combining the mobility of a robot with air filtration, the efficacy of cleaning up the air around multiple people is largely increased. A disinfection co-robot prototype is thus developed to provide continuous and occupant-friendly protection to people gathering indoors, specifically for …
People are proficient at communicating their intentions in order to avoid conflicts when navigating in narrow, crowded environments. In many situations mobile robots lack both the ability to interpret human intentions and the ability to clearly communicate their own intentions to people sharing their space. This work addresses the second of these points, leveraging insights about how people implicitly communicate with each other through observations of behaviors such as gaze to provide mobile robots with better social navigation skills. In a preliminary human study, the importance of gaze as a…
We consider the problem of people search by a mobile social robot in case of a situation that cannot be solved by the robot alone. Examples are physically opening a closed door or operating an elevator. Based on the Behavior Tree framework, we create a modular and easily extendable action sequence with the goal of finding a person to assist the robot. By decomposing the Behavior Tree as a Discrete Time Markov Chain, we obtain an estimate of the probability and rate of success of the options for action, especially where the robot should wait or search for people.In a real-world experiment, the …
Citard Services Ltd.（Citard服务有限公司）；University of Cyprus（塞浦路斯大学）
SocialRobot is a collaborative European project, which focuses on providing a practical and interactive solution to improve the quality of life of elderly people. Having this in mind, a state of the art robotic mobile platform has been integrated with virtual social care technology to meet the elderly individual needs and requirements, following a human centered approach. In this short paper, we make an overview of SocialRobot, the developed architecture and the human-robot interactive scenarios being prepared and tested in the framework of the project for dissemination and exploitation purpos…
University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld（比勒费尔德应用科学大学）；Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg（马格德堡奥托·冯·格里克大学）
The increasing number of robots in home environments leads to an emerging coexistence between humans and robots. Robots undertake common tasks and support the residents in their everyday life. People appreciate the presence of robots in their environment as long as they keep the control over them. One important aspect is the control of a robot's workspace. Therefore, we introduce virtual borders to precisely and flexibly define the workspace of mobile robots. First, we propose a novel framework that allows a person to interactively restrict a mobile robot's workspace. To show the validity of t…
To be useful in everyday environments, robots must be able to identify and locate real-world objects. In recent years, video object segmentation has made significant progress on densely separating such objects from background in real and challenging videos. Building off of this progress, this paper addresses the problem of identifying generic objects and locating them in 3D using a mobile robot with an RGB camera. We achieve this by, first, introducing a video object segmentation-based approach to visual servo control and active perception and, second, developing a new Hadamard-Broyden update …
Scene understanding is an active research area. Commercial depth sensors, such as Kinect, have enabled the release of several RGB-D datasets over the past few years which spawned novel methods in 3D scene understanding. More recently with the launch of the LiDAR sensor in Apple's iPads and iPhones, high quality RGB-D data is accessible to millions of people on a device they commonly use. This opens a whole new era in scene understanding for the Computer Vision community as well as app developers. The fundamental research in scene understanding together with the advances in machine learning can…
Kanagawa Institute of Technology（神奈川工科大学）；OryLab Inc.（OryLab公司）；Keio University（庆应义塾大学）
Telework "avatar work," in which people with disabilities can engage in physical work such as customer service, is being implemented in society. In order to enable avatar work in a variety of occupations, we propose a mobile sales system using a mobile frozen drink machine and an avatar robot "OriHime", focusing on mobile customer service like peddling. The effect of the peddling by the system on the customers are examined based on the results of video annotation.
When mobile robots maneuver near people, they run the risk of rudely blocking their paths; but not all people behave the same around robots. People that have not noticed the robot are the most difficult to predict. This paper investigates how mobile robots can generate acceptable paths in dynamic environments by predicting human behavior. Here, human behavior may include both physical and mental behavior, we focus on the latter. We introduce a simple safe interaction model: when a human seems unaware of the robot, it should avoid going too close. In this study, people around robots are detecte…
State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton（纽约州立大学宾汉姆顿分校）
Mobile telepresence robots (MTRs) allow people to navigate and interact with a remote environment that is in a place other than the person's true location. Thanks to the recent advances in 360 degree vision, many MTRs are now equipped with an all-degree visual perception capability. However, people's visual field horizontally spans only about 120 degree of the visual field captured by the robot. To bridge this observability gap toward human-MTR shared autonomy, we have developed a framework, called GHAL360, to enable the MTR to learn a goal-oriented policy from reinforcements for guiding human…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Eating is an essential activity of daily living (ADL) for staying healthy and living at home independently. Although numerous assistive devices have been introduced, many people with disabilities are still restricted from independent eating due to the devices' physical or perceptual limitations. In this work, we present a new meal-assistance system and evaluations of this system with people with motor impairments. We also discuss learned lessons and design insights based on the evaluations. The meal-assistance system uses a general-purpose mobile manipulator, a Willow Garage PR2, which has the…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学应用物理实验室）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Human-aware robot navigation promises a range of applications in which mobile robots bring versatile assistance to people in common human environments. While prior research has mostly focused on modeling pedestrians as independent, intentional individuals, people move in groups; consequently, it is imperative for mobile robots to respect human groups when navigating around people. This paper explores learning group-aware navigation policies based on dynamic group formation using deep reinforcement learning. Through simulation experiments, we show that group-aware policies, compared to baseline…
Automated Driving Lab, Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学自动驾驶实验室）
The novel Corona virus pandemic is one of the biggest worldwide problems right now. While hygiene and wearing masks make up a large portion of the currently suggested precautions by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO), social distancing is another and arguably the most important precaution that would protect people since the airborne virus is easily transmitted through the air. Social distancing while walking outside, can be more effective, if pedestrians know locations of each other and even better if they know locations of people who are p…
General-purpose mobile manipulators have the potential to serve as a versatile form of assistive technology. However, their complexity creates challenges, including the risk of being too difficult to use. We present a proof-of-concept robotic system for assistive feeding that consists of a Willow Garage PR2, a high-level web-based interface, and specialized autonomous behaviors for scooping and feeding yogurt. As a step towards use by people with disabilities, we evaluated our system with 5 able-bodied participants. All 5 successfully ate yogurt using the system and reported high rates of succ…
Brown University（布朗大学）；Rhode Island School of Design（罗德岛设计学院）
Our paper focuses on the research of the possibility for speech recognition intelligent agents to assist the elderly and disabled people's lives, to improve their life quality by utilizing cutting-edge technologies. After researching the attitude of elderly and disabled people toward the household agent, we propose a design framework: ESNI(Exploration, Segmentation, Navigation, Instruction) that apply to mobile agent, achieve some functionalities such as processing human commands, picking up a specified object, and moving an object to another location. The agent starts the exploration in an un…
