Early detection and adaptive support to changing individual needs related to ageing is an important challenge in today's society. In this paper we present a system called GiraffPlus that aims at addressing such a challenge and is developed in an on-going European project. The system consists of a network of home sensors that can be automatically configured to collect data for a range of monitoring services; a semi-autonomous telepresence robot; a sophisticated context recognition system that can give high-level and long term interpretations of the collected data and respond to certain events; and personalized services delivered through adaptive user interfaces for primary users. The system performs a range of services including data collection and analysis of long term trends in behaviors and physiological parameters (e.g. relating to sleep or daily activity); warnings, alarms and reminders; and social interaction through the telepresence robot. The latter is based on the Giraff telepresence robot, which is already in place in a number of homes. A distinctive aspect of the project is that the GiraffPlus system will be installed and evaluated in at least 15 homes of elderly people. This paper provides a general overview of the GiraffPlus system and its evaluation.

Robotic telepresence, also known as telerobotics is a subfield of telepresence whose aim is to increase presence via embodiment in a robotic platform. In particular, robotic telepresence can be an effective tool to enhance social interaction suited to certain groups of users such as the elderly. The aim of this workshop is to address various aspects important for social robotic telepresence which include but are not limited to, (1) the mechanical design, (2) the user interface design, (3) the interaction between the remotely embodied person and the locally embodied person and (4) the perception of social robotic telepresence systems. Furthermore, we are interested in discovering the added value of spatial presence in the context of social telepresence and comparisons between robotic and non-robotic systems are of interest. We welcome contributions concerning results reached from the above mentioned areas of interest, user evaluation and methodologies, as well as reports from the deployment of social robotic solutions into real world contexts.

In this paper we describe an implemented framework that integrates knowledge representation and reasoning in a symbiotic system. In such systems a number of heterogeneous sensors pervasively embedded in the environment, mobile robots and humans co-exist and communicate. In this work, the integration is mediated through perceptual anchoring, which creates and maintains the correspondences between the symbol system and the perceptual data that refer to the same physical object. The overall framework is evaluated using ResearchCyc as the knowledge representation and reasoning system, within the context of a physical testbed, which consists of a small apartment-like home.

In this paper we investigate how a mobile robot equipped with tin dioxide gas sensors and an anemometer can use an online classification algorithm in order to improve the exploration strategy. The purpose of the platform is to establish the character of a gas source with accuracy while minimizing the time required for exploration. For this to be possible, the output of the classification algorithm is probabilistic, feeding in a sequence of posterior probabilities to a path planner. To further assist path planning, a 3d-ultrasonic anemometer is available which give indication on the average wind speed and direction. In addition to evaluating different olfaction driven path planning strategies, experimental validations also evaluate the classification algorithms and its application to different environments with varying characteristics.

Classification of odours with an array of gas sensors mounted on a mobile robot is a challenging and still relatively unexplored topic. Mobile robots able to classify an odour could navigate to a specific source or isolate high concentration areas in applications such as environmental monitoring. A key aspect to classification is to be able to process the data collected while moving the robot and using a simple and compact sensor system. In order to achieve this, we present a classification algorithm that is based on the transient response from the sensors. An analysis of how classification results vary with regards to the movement of the robot is provided and subsequently the experimental validations show that the classification performance depends more on how the robot traverses the odour plume and the quality of the transient than on the distance from the source location. The experimental validation has been done in a large unmodified indoor environment.

In this paper we present initial experiments towards environmental monitoring with a mobile platform. A prototype of a pollution monitoring robot was set up which measures the gas distribution using an ldquoelectronic noserdquo and provides three dimensional wind measurements using an ultrasonic anemometer. We describe the design of the robot and the experimental setup used to run trials under varying environmental conditions. We then present the results of the gas distribution mapping. The trials which were carried out in three uncontrolled environments with very different properties: an enclosed indoor area, a part of a long corridor with open ends and a high ceiling, and an outdoor scenario are presented and discussed.

In this work we report results on the use of symbolic knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) for perceptual anchoring. Anchoring is the creation and maintenance of a connection between the symbolic and perceptual description that refer to the same physical object in the environment. We extend the anchoring framework to manage the symbolic information in a KRR system, and to exploit this knowledge and the inference mechanism to recover from failures in the anchoring of symbols. We show a simulated scenario where the system communicates with a user to interactively resolve an ambiguous description using the knowledge base, and in particular spatial relations. This is a first step towards a KRR-supported anchoring framework that we will use for human-robot communication.

We present a new approach for odour detection and recognition based on a so-called PEIS-Ecology: a network of gas sensors and a mobile robot are integrated in an intelligent environment. The environment can provide information regarding the location of potential odour sources, which is then relayed to a mobile robot equipped with an electronic nose. The robot can then perform a more thorough analysis of the odour character. This is a novel approach which alleviates some the challenges in mobile olfaction techniques by single and embedded mobile robots. The environment also provides contextual information which can be used to constrain the learning of odours, which is shown to improve classification performance

More and more work in the field of artificial olfaction considers the integration of olfaction onto robotic systems. An important part of this integration is providing the robot with the ability to discriminate between different odour substances. This work presents the integration of an electronic nose onto a complete robotic system with multi-sensing modalities. The ambition of this work is to illustrate how classification performance of odours can be improved through the exploitation of the mobility of a robot, as well as through the cooperation between a human user and an electronic perceptual system. These points are highlighted in the context of a online robotic system designed to perform different tasks which require the ability to discriminate between odour characters. The robotic system and experimental results are presented where these tasks are tested and evaluated.

The success of mobile robots, and particularly of those interfacing with humans in daily environments (e.g., assistant robots), relies on the ability to manipulate information beyond simple spatial relations. We are interested in semantic information, which gives meaning to spatial information like images or geometric maps. We present a multi-hierarchical approach to enable a mobile robot to acquire semantic information from its sensors, and to use it for navigation tasks. In our approach, the link between spatial and semantic information is established via anchoring. We show experiments on a real mobile robot that demonstrate its ability to use and infer new semantic information from its environment, improving its operation.

Olfaction is a challenging new sensing modality for intelligent systems. With the emergence of electronic noses it is now possible to detect and recognise a range of different odours for a variety of applications. An existing application is to use electronic olfaction on mobile robots for the purpose of odour based navigation. In this work, we introduce a new application where electronic olfaction is used in cooperation with other types of sensors on a mobile robot in order to acquire the odour property of objects. The mobility of the robot facilitates the execution of specific perceptual actions, such as moving closer to objects to acquire odour properties. Additional sensing modalities provides the spatial detection of objects and electronic olfaction then acquires the odour property which can be used for discrimination and recognition of the object being considered. We examine the problem of deciding when, how and where the e-nose should be activated by planning for active perception. We investigate the use of symbolic reasoning techniques in this context and consider the problem of integrating the information provided by the e-nose with both prior information and information from other sensors (e.g., vision). Finally, experiments are performed on a mobile robot equipped with an e-nose together with a variety of sensors that can perform decision making tasks in realistic environments.

An intelligent physical agent must incorporate motor and perceptual processes to interface with the physical world, and abstract cognitive processes to reason about the world and the options available. One crucial aspect of incorporating cognitive processes into a physically embedded reasoning system is the integration between the symbols used by the reasoning processes to denote physical objects, and the perceptual data corresponding to these objects. We treat this integration aspect by proposing a fuzzy computational theory of anchoring. Anchoring is the process of creating and maintaining the correspondence between symbols and percepts that refer to the same physical objects. Modeling this process using fuzzy set-theoretic notions enables dealing with perceptual data that can be affected by uncertainty/imprecision and imprecise/vague linguistic descriptions of objects.