A Planner for Ambient Assisted Living:From High-Level Reasoning to Low-Level Robot Execution and Back

Abstract

Robot ecologies are a growing paradigm in which oneor several robotic systems are integrated into a smartenvironment. Robotic ecologies hold great promises forelderly assistance. Planning the activities of these systems,however, is not trivial, and requires considerationof issues like temporal and information dependenciesamong different parts of the ecology, exogenous actions,and multiple, dynamic goals. We describe a plannerable to cope with the above challenges. We showin particular how this planner has been incorporatedin closed-loop into a full robotic system that performsdaily tasks in support of elderly people. The full robotecology is deployed in a test apartment inside a real residentialbuilding, and it is currently undergoing an extensiveuser evaluation.