Service robots – the end of the beginning?

Safety is one of the most important issues in service robots. We have proposed a velocity-based mechanical safety device for service robots. The safety device is attached to each drive-shaft of service robots. If the device detects an unexpected high angular velocity of the drive-shaft, the device stops the robot. In this paper, in order to further improve human safety, we propose a velocity and contact force-based mechanical safety device for service robots. The safety device is also attached to each drive-shaft of service robots. The new device stops the robot, if the device detects an unexpected high angular velocity of the drive-shaft or an unexpected large contact force between the robot and the environments (e.g. humans). The device can work even if the robot's controller does not work, because the device consists of only passive mechanical components without actuators, controllers, or batteries. Firstly, we describe the characteristics of the new safety device. Secondly, we explain the structure and mechanism of the new safety device. Thirdly, we show a wheeled robot equipped with the new safety device which we developed. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the new safety device by experiments.

In the design of service robots, a key research focus has been on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) required in service applications. HRI is one of the critical factors that determines the acceptability of a service robot. The user acceptance of a service robot and its applications is highly related to HRI, as HRI affects the user perception and user experience related to the robot. In this paper, a new design approach is proposed for designing and implementing HRI for service robot applications designed for real scenarios in the real-world environment. The objective of this design approach is to facilitate inter-disciplinary collaborations, which are essential for HRI research and for developing successful products. The proposed design approach was used in the design of the healthcare service robot “Cafero” developed at the University of Auckland in collaboration with the Electronic and Telecommunication Research Institute (ETRI) and Yujin Robot Company Ltd. of Korea. Vital signs measurement, medication management, entertainment and falls detection were implemented as service applications of Cafero. In the design process, UML and UMLi modelling diagrams were used to model the robot’s multi-modal and interactive behaviour. Interaction design patterns were defined to represent recurring interactions or social cues in HRI using UMLi notations. The proposed design approach emphasises an iterative process to allow discovery of additional HRI requirements in the early design stage and to implement through Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE). The design of communication initiation and user identification by Cafero is presented as a case study, in order to evaluate the proposed design approach. In this case study, enabling a service robot to act proactively to the presence of a potential user and identifying the user prior to providing healthcare services is presented. For the implementation, Open-RTM component-oriented framework was used.

The share of service robots is increasing. Large number of those robots are the professional service robots such as customer service and logistics robots. One of the main requirements of these robots is the ability to navigate in an environment where a GPS system cannot be used. This article investigates existing methods for indoor localization and navigation. It proposes a new complete approach. This approach does not require the integration of a new indoor navigation system. Instead, the existing 24/7 video surveillance infrastructure, as well as the capabilities of the service robot, are considered. The proposed approach can reduce both the initial cost of integrating the robotic system as well as the maintenance costs. Subsequent maintenance can be done entirely remotely. The suggested approach is validated experimentally on a mobile robot.

Human robot interaction (HRI) is core to the design of service robots. The interaction during a service application determines how a user perceives the robot, which affects the user's experience and how well the user accepts the robot and its services. During the last decade, robotics service applications in close proximity to human users have been a popular research area. Research in related fields such as computer vision has also made significant advances to make available many interaction algorithms for HRI. However, we argue that there is only minimum utilization of these algorithms in the construction of HRI needed in actual service robots, despite their availability. This is partly because these algorithms have inherent limitations and only solve some of the HRI issues required in a complete service scenario in real environments. In this paper, a new general design approach is proposed to utilize modeling languages UML and UMLi to describe a service scenario and model the HRI required in a complete service. These models can be further used to elicit sometimes hidden HRI requirements from limitations in the interaction algorithms used. This approach helps multidisciplinary research to make HRI design decisions early at the design stage and guide implementation by software engineers. A user identification service scenario was designed, implemented and used as the case study of this design approach. It was integrated with a medication reminder application on a robot which was deployed and evaluated with the older people in a retirement village in New Zealand.

Service robotics is becoming a reality in many aspects of daily life due to the successful merger of several enabling technologies from the fields of Information and Communication Technologies. The growing availability of mass market products is also driving innovation towards automation in several civil and scientific areas. Specific applications such as precision farming, surveying, rescue operations and remote exploration can benefit from such modern and affordable robots, thus helping humans in work-related or daily life. To support such a new generation of service robots and vehicles, navigation capabilities play a fundamental role in mission planning and on-field activities. In parallel, recent developments of ultra-low cost embedded Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), such as in Android™ smartphones has enabled affordable Location Based Services (LBS) applications and provided an impetus to research into low cost navigation solutions. Modern smartphones come with an advantage of having a ubiquitous network infrastructure with ease of developing interconnected applications and integrated proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensors. Within the framework of precision agriculture promoted by the Politecnico di Torino Interdepartmental Centre for Service Robotics, this work investigates a low-cost navigation strategy for an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) – Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) paradigm exploiting a collaborative ranging technique based on Differential GNSS (DGNSS) approach applied on raw measurements exchanged between Android™ smartphones.

Our aim is to develop the service robot based on a systematic software engineering method, particularly for real-time, embedded and distributed systems with UML. To do so, we applied the COMET method, which is a UML-based method for the development of concurrent applications, specifically distributed and real-time applications. We describe our experience of applying the COMET/UML method to developing the service robot for the elderly, T-Rot, which is under development at CIR. Here, our emphasis was on an autonomous navigation system for the service robot, which is one of the most challenging issues and is essential in developing service robots, especially mobile service robots to help elderly people. It includes hardware integration for various sensors and actuators as well as software development and integration of modules like a path planner and a localizer.

One of the functionalities a service robot should have, to work in a smart environment, is object recognition and handling of objects. Many researchers have attempted to make service robots recognize objects in natural environments but no conventional vision systems can recognize target objects in complex scenes. We built a prototype smart environment in our research building at Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH) to demonstrate the feasibility that a service robot with few sensors can provide reliable services by interacting with an environment full of smart devices through wireless sensor network communications. In this paper, we address the issues of how to develop an object recognition system for our RoboMaidHome project. Our object recognition system can not only recognize objects with no need of a previous training stage but make the service robot light-weight with minimum hardware and software requirements while working well in a smart home environment. In addition, the matching process for object recognition is simple since only a few image processing techniques are employed. Our object recognition scheme on the basis of MPEG-7 visual descriptors is under development and includes color, texture, and shape. It will also be incorporated into our mobile service robotics system.

This paper proposes a system architecture for USN with a service robot to provide more active assisted living services for elderly persons by monitoring their mental and physical well-being with USN environments at home, hospital, or silver town. Sensors embedded in USN are used to detect preventive measures for chronic disease. Logged data are transferred to main controller of a service robot via wireless channel in which the analysis of data is performed. For the purpose of handling emergency situations, it needs real-time processing on gathering variety sensor data, routing algorithms for sensor nodes to a moving sink node and processing of logged data. This paper realized multi-hop sensor network to detect user movements with biometric data transmission and performed algorithms on Xenomai, a real-time embedded Linux. To leverage active sensing, a mobile robot is used of which task was implemented with a priority to process urgent data came from the sink-node. This software architecture is anticipated to integrate sensing, communication and computing with real-time manner. In order to verify the usefulness of a proposed system, the performance of data transferring and processing on a real-time OS with non real-time OS is also evaluated.

As sensing and image recognition technologies advance, the environments where service robots operate expand into human-centered environments. Since the roles of service robots depend on the user situations, it is important for the robots to understand human intentions. Gaze information, such as gazed objects (i. e., the objects humans are looking at) can help to understand the users’ intentions. In this paper, we propose a real-time gazed object identification method from RGBD images captured by a camera mounted on a mobile service robot. First, we search for the candidate gazed objects using state-of-the-art, real-time object detection. Second, we estimate the human face direction using facial landmarks extracted by a real-time face detection tool. Then, by searching for an object along the estimated face direction, we identify the gazed object. If the gazed object identification fails even though a user is looking at an object, i. e., has a fixed gaze direction, the robot can determine whether the object is inside or outside the robot’s view based on the face direction, and, then, change its point of view to improve the identification. Finally, through multiple evaluation experiments with the mobile service robot Pepper, we verified the effectiveness of the proposed identification and the improvement of the identification accuracy by changing the robot’s point of view.

This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of research publications (Virkus et al. 2023) on the application of robotics in the hospitality and tourism industry (Sharma 2024). Robotics is transforming various industries, including tourism, where technologies such as service robots, social robots, intelligent robots, and mobile robots are increasingly adopted (Ladeira 2023). Publications from 2014 to 2023 were collected from the Scopus database and analyzed (Carè and Cumming 2024) based on several criteria, including document type, language, publication year, country of origin, authorship, affiliations, sources, citations, keywords, and research areas. VOSviewer was used to visualize research trends related to the application of robots in hospitality and tourism. An analysis of 110 documents revealed a consistent increase in publications over the past decade, with China leading in publication output, followed by the United Kingdom and the United States. The International Journal of Hospitality Management emerged as the most prolific journal in this field, and the University of Surrey, Guildford, was identified as the leading institution in terms of publication volume. Keyword analysis underscored the primary research areas associated with service robots in tourism. This bibliometric study highlights the expanding literature on robotics applications within the tourism sector and serves as a valuable resource for researchers and industry stakeholders seeking to understand the current state and trends in the field (Valeri and Albattat 2024).

How can service robotics be useful? Beyond the immediate requirement of providing a customer with a useful solution lies the comfort of providing useful robots to society at large. A closer look is given to the use of machine vision, remote datacenter control and mobile robotics in area surveillance. Criteria of usefulness are identified from several vantage points: the market-demand, business and social standpoints.

This study presents key technologies of a mobile service robot developed to manipulate objects around people safely. We demonstrate this ability to support staff in elderly care homes in the future. The take-over by a service robot allows the staff to spend less time with routine logistical tasks and therefore better focus on the interaction with residents. In the selected application scenario, the robot helps staff by (1) retrieving empty bottles from the residents' rooms, (2) bringing them to the kitchen, (3) taking the refilled bottles back to a table inside the residents' rooms. This task seems trivial for a person, but the robot needs to orchestrate numerous algorithms and components to work smoothly, such as bottle pose detection, manipulation, and navigation. A technical evaluation indicates a high performance of single components, but due to isolated failures, the overall scenario does not always succeed. Next to the technical aspects, it is fundamental to determine the acceptance of the robot, which was achieved by analyzing questionnaires given to care workers. Finally, this paper presents lessons learned to help other researchers in similar use-cases.

The concept of service robotics has grown considerably over the past two decades with many robots being used in non-industrial environments such homes, hospitals and airports. Many of these environments were never designed to have mobile service robots deployed within them. This paper describes some of the challenges that are faced and need to be overcome in order for robots to successfully work in non-industrial environments (specifically homes and hospitals). These include the problems caused by an environment not having been designed to be robot-friendly, the unstructured nature of the environment and finally the challenges presented by certain user populations who may have difficulties interacting with a robot.

ROBOT SAPIENS ON THE MOVE TO … PERSONAL ROBOTS

Robot Sapiens on the Move to … Personal Robots