An Open Source Robotic Platform for Ambient Assisted Living.

Abstract

Last years have seen a worldwide lengthening of life expectancy [1] and, as a consequence, an increment of advanced assistive solutions for integrated care models. In this context, ICT can enhance home assistance services for elderly people and thus, the economical burden for health-care institutions. Indeed, recent studies report that 89% wish to stay at home for sentimental reasons or because they cannot afford nursing homes [2]. In addition, the shortage of professional caregivers is a well-known issue and relatives or friends must face with emotional distress negatively impacting also their productivity at work [3]. In this perspective, home robots will play a crucial role. Not only they will keep their house safe by monitoring and detecting anomalies or sources of hazards but they can also be companions able to enhance their social life, e.g. by better connecting them with their relatives and friends. Examples of recent projects that have tried to develop such a kind of systems are Hobbit [4, 5], Astro [6, 7] and Giraffplus [8]. The difficulties in creating a robust and reliable prototype and the encountered challenges in computer vision and autonomous robotics have been well-explained in [5]. This work aims at presenting an open-source and practical solution for an autonomous robotic platform for home care. The final goal is to develop a set of artificial intelligence services for indoor autonomous and safe navigation, fall detection, people recognition, speech interaction and telepresence. In Section 2 and 3 respectively, the prototype and the tasks currently implemented are described. We have developed these functions in ROS: Robot Operating System [9] which provides many algorithms and a standard communication framework. The need for standards and open solutions have been already pointed out in [10]. Future works are reported in Section 4: this project enables research in many fields like scene understanding, human robot interaction, socially assistive/intelligent robotics and sensor integration.