| 1. |
- Cavallo, Filippo, et al.
(författare)
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Development of a socially believable multi-robot solution from town to home
- 2014
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Ingår i: Cognitive Computation. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1866-9956 .- 1866-9964. ; 6:4, s. 954-967
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)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.
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| 2. |
- Di Rocco, Maurizio, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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A Planner for Ambient Assisted Living : From High-Level Reasoning to Low-Level Robot Execution and Back
- 2014
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Ingår i: Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium. - : AAAI Press.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)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.
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| 3. |
- Bacciu, Davide, et al.
(författare)
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Learning context-aware mobile robot navigation in home environments
- 2014
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Ingår i: IISA 2014. - New York : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). ; , s. 57-62
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present an approach to make planning adaptive in order to enable context-aware mobile robot navigation. We integrate a model-based planner with a distributed learning system based on reservoir computing, to yield personalized planning and resource allocations that account for user preferences and environmental changes. We demonstrate our approach in a real robot ecology, and show that the learning system can effectively exploit historical data about navigation performance to modify the models in the planner, without any prior information oncerning the phenomenon being modeled. The plans produced by the adapted CL fail more rarely than the ones generated by a non-adaptive planner. The distributed learning system handles the new learning task autonomously, and is able to automatically identify the sensorial information most relevant for the task, thus reducing the communication and computational overhead of the predictive task.
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| 4. |
- Bacciu, D., et al.
(författare)
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Self-sustaining learning for robotic ecologies
- 2012
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The most common use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to collect environmental data from a specificarea, and to channel it to a central processing node for on-line or off-line analysis. The WSN technology,however, can be used for much more ambitious goals. We claim that merging the concepts and technology ofWSN with the concepts and technology of distributed robotics and multi-agent systems can open new waysto design systems able to provide intelligent services in our homes and working places. We also claim thatendowing these systems with learning capabilities can greatly increase their viability and acceptability, bysimplifying design, customization and adaptation to changing user needs. To support these claims, we illus-trate our architecture for an adaptive robotic ecology, named RUBICON, consisting of a network of sensors,effectors and mobile robots.
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| 5. |
- Bruno, Barbara, et al.
(författare)
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Using fuzzy logic to enhance classification of human motion primitives
- 2014
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Ingår i: Information processing and management of uncertainty in knowledge-based systems, PT II. - Cham : Springer. - 9783319088549 - 9783319088556 ; , s. 596-605
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The design of automated systems for the recognition of specific human activities is among the most promising research activities in Ambient Intelligence. The literature suggests the adoption of wearable devices, relying on acceleration information to model the activities of interest and distance metrics for the comparison of such models with the run-time data. Most current solutions do not explicitly model the uncertainty associated with the recognition, but rely on crisp thresholds and comparisons which introduce brittleness and inaccuracy in the system. We propose a framework for the recognition of simple activities in which recognition uncertainty is modelled using possibility distributions. We show that reasoning about this explicitly modelled uncertainty leads to a system with enhanced recognition accuracy and precision.
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| 6. |
- Cirillo, Marcello, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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Human-aware planning for robots embedded in ambient ecologies
- 2012
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Ingår i: Pervasive and Mobile Computing. - : Elsevier. - 1574-1192 .- 1873-1589. ; 8:4, s. 542-561
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We address the issue of human-robot cohabitation in smart environments. In particular, the presence of humans in a robot's work space has a profound influence on how the latter should plan its actions. We propose the use of Human-Aware Planning, an approach in which the robot exploits the capabilities of a sensor-rich environment to obtain information about the (current and future) activities of the people in the environment, and plans its tasks accordingly.Here, we formally describe the planning problem behind our approach, we analyze its complexity and we detail the algorithm of our planner. We then show two application scenarios that could benefit from the techniques described. The first scenario illustrates the applicability of human-aware planning in a domestic setting, while the second one illustrates its use for a robotic helper in a hospital. Finally, we present a five hour-long test run in a smart home equipped with real sensors, where a cleaning robot has been deployed and where a human subject is acting. This test run in a real setting is meant to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to human-robot interaction.
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| 7. |
- Cirillo, Marcello, et al.
(författare)
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Human-aware task planning : an application to mobile robots
- 2010
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Ingår i: ACM transactions on interactive intelligent systems. - : ACM Press. - 2157-6904. ; 1:2, s. Article 15-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Consider a house cleaning robot planning its activities for the day. Assume that the robot expects the human inhabitant to first dress, then have breakfast, and finally go out. Then, it should plan not to clean the bedroom while the human is dressing, and to clean the kitchen after the human has had breakfast. In general, robots operating in inhabited environments, like households and future factory floors, should plan their behavior taking into account the actions that will be performed by the humans sharing the same environment. This would improve human-robot cohabitation, for example, by avoiding undesired situations for the human. Unfortunately, current task planners only consider the robot's actions and unexpected external events in the planning process, and cannot accommodate expectations about the actions of the humans.In this article, we present a human-aware planner able to address this problem. Our planner supports alternative hypotheses of the human plan, temporal duration for the actions of both the robot and the human, constraints on the interaction between robot and human, partial goal achievement and, most importantly, the possibility to use observations of human actions in the policy generated for the robot. Our planner has been tested both as a stand-alone component and within a full framework for human-robot interaction in a real environment.
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| 8. |
- Cirillo, Marcello
(författare)
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Planning in Inhabited Environments : Human-Aware Task Planning and Activity Recognition
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Promised some decades ago by researchers in artificial intelligence and robotics as an imminent breakthrough in our everyday lives, a robotic assistant that could work with us in our home and our workplace is a dream still far from being fulfilled. The work presented in this thesis aims at bringing this future vision a little closer to realization. Here, we start from the assumption that an efficient robotic helper should not impose constraints on users' activities, but rather perform its tasks unobtrusively to fulfill its goals and to facilitate people in achieving their objectives. Also, the helper should be able to consider the outcome of possible future actions by the human users, to assess how those would affect the environment with respect to the agent's objectives, and to predict when its support will be needed. In this thesis we address two highly interconnected problems that are essential for the cohabitation of people and service robots: robot task planning and human activity recognition. First, we present human-aware planning, that is, our approach to robot high-level symbolic reasoning for plan generation. Human-aware planning can be applied in situations where there is a controllable agent, the robot, whose actions we can plan, and one or more uncontrollable agents, the human users, whose future actions we can only try to predict. In our approach, therefore, the knowledge of the users' current and future activities is an important prerequisite. We define human-aware as a new type of planning problem, we formalize the extensions needed by a classical planner to solve such a problem, and we present the implementation of a planner that satisfies all identified requirements. In this thesis we explore also a second issue, which is a prerequisite to the first one: human activity monitoring in intelligent environments. We adopt a knowledge driven approach to activity recognition, whereby a constraint-based domain description is used to correlate sensor readings to human activities. We validate our solutions to both human-aware planning and activity recognition both theoretically and experimentally, describing a number of explanatory examples and test runs in a real environment.
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| 9. |
- Cirillo, Marcello, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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Proactive assistance in ecologies of physically embedded intelligent systems : a constraint-based approach
- 2011
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Ingår i: Handbook of research on ambient intelligence and smart environments. - : IGI Global. - 9781616928575 ; , s. 534-557
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The main goal of this Chapter is to introduce SAM, an integrated architecture for concurrent activity recognition, planning and execution. SAM provides a general framework to define how an intelligent environment can assess contextual information from sensory data. The architecture builds upon a temporal reasoning framework operating in closed-loop between physical sensing and actuation components in a smart environments. The capabilities of the system as well as possible examples of its use are discussed in the context of the PEIS-Home, a smart environment integrated with robotic components.
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| 10. |
- Di Lello, Enrico, et al.
(författare)
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The PEIS table : an autonomous robotic table for domestic environments
- 2011
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Ingår i: Automatika. - : Croatian Society for Communications, Computing, Electronics, Measurement and Control. - 0005-1144 .- 1848-3380. ; 52:3, s. 244-255
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There are two main trends in the area of home and service robotics. The classical one aims at the developmentof a single skilled servant robot, able to perform complex tasks in a passive environment. The second, more recenttrend aims at the achievement of complex tasks through the cooperation of a network of simpler robotic devicespervasively embedded in the domestic environment. This paper contributes to the latter trend by describing the PEISTable, an autonomous robotic table that can be embedded in a smart environment. The robotic table can operatealone, performing simple point-to-point navigation, or it can collaborate with other devices in the environment toperform more complex tasks. Collaboration follows the PEIS Ecology model. The hardware and software designof the PEIS Table are guided by a set of requirements for robotic domestic furniture that differ, to some extent, fromthe requirements usually considered for service robots.
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