CARE: Cooperation of ai Robot Enablers to Create a Vibrant Society

Abstract

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.