Assistive technology is an emerging area where robotic devices can be used to strengthen the residual abilities of individuals with motor disabilities or to help them achieve independence in the activities of daily living. This paper deals with a project aimed at designing a system that provides remote control of home-installed appliances, including the Sony AIBO, a commercial mobile robot. The development of the project is described by focusing on the design of the robot navigation system. Single step, semi-autonomous and autonomous operating modes have been realized to provide different levels of interaction with AIBO. Automatic collision avoidance is integrated in all cases. The performance of the navigation system is shown by experiments. Moreover, the system underwent clinical validation, in order to obtain a definitive assessment through patient feedback.

Fuzzy aggregation is the way in which different contributions to the same fuzzy fact are merged together to obtain a possibility distribution representative of the acquired knowledge. The choice of the aggregation function is a fundamental step in the definition of inference framework. In most cases aggregation has some monotonicity property and this can lead to saturation problems in complex frameworks, particularly in stateful rational agents. In this paper, we propose an extension to the fuzzy aggregation to handle these cases and apply fuzzy reasoning to complex KBs. We especially focus on Mamdani inference framework, where aggregation is implemented by a triangular conorm.

The ASPICE project aims at the development of a system which allows the neuromotor disabled persons to improve or recover their mobility (directly or by emulation) and communication within the surrounding environment. The system pivots around a software controller running on a personal computer, which offers a proper interface to communicate through input interfaces matched with the individual's residual abilities.This system links to the concept of user-centered interface promoted by human-computer interaction researchers. Each person has a "singular disability", thus the system must provide the possibility to use an adaptive interface customized to their own ability and requirements, which stem from contingent factors or simple preferences, depending on the user and his or her life stage, task, and environment.At this time, the system is under clinical validation, that will provide assessment through patients' feedback and guidelines for customized system installation.