SBIR Phase I: Assistive Robots for Personal Care and COVID-19 Protection

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力推动了一类新兴的基于视觉的自主导航技术的发展，为低成本/高性能的个人辅助机器人打开了新的可能性。机器人解决方案使行动不便的个人能够对他们的环境有更多的代理，并享受更高的生活质量。这有助于解决老年人和急症后护理患者护理人员严重短缺的问题，使个人能够保持独立性，扩大护理人员的影响，并降低家庭和设施环境中的护理费用。此外，通过在新冠肺炎护理环境中提供负担得起且可靠的隔离支持，建议的解决方案可以帮助减轻财政负担并增加与新冠肺炎疾病管理相关的公共健康成果。核心机器人解决方案仅在美国就有1100万高需求用户，预计产品推出五年后的收入约为16.5亿美元。进一步的商业化机会来自于将已开发的导航技术的部分许可用于其他机器人应用，并围绕核心机器人解决方案开发补充产品的生态系统。这个小企业创新研究第一阶段项目旨在实现新一代辅助服务机器人，这些机器人在性能上与商用机器人相当，但在个人使用和个人护理应用方面明显更实惠。这项创新采用了来自增强现实的新兴视觉定位技术，使移动机器人能够使用低成本的消费级电子产品进行稳健的导航，同时解决了视觉定位系统的一个关键限制，即外部照明条件和环境中的其他变化会极大地影响它们的性能。这项创新通过硬件和软件的结合来解决这些挑战，这些硬件和软件可以学习和稳定环境中最高价值的视觉元素，以在照明条件和长时间内保持持久性-这一发展对于使辅助机器人大规模采用具有成本效益至关重要。研究目标包括：全面开发和集成视觉持久性系统，在具有代表性的照明条件和目标操作环境的视觉特征范围内实现准确且可复制的机器人导航性能，并对照最先进的技术对最终解决方案进行基准测试，以展示其卓越的性能(即，在其他解决方案失败的情况下，它至少可以成功本地化90%)。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project advances the state-of-the art of an emerging class of vision-based, autonomous navigation technologies to open new possibilities for low-cost/high-performance personal assistive robots. The robotics solution enables mobility-impaired individuals to have more agency over their environment and enjoy a higher quality-of-life. This helps address the severe shortage of caregivers for the elderly and post-acute care patients by empowering individuals to maintain their independence, extending the impact of caregivers, and reducing the cost of care in both home and facility settings. Additionally, by providing affordable and reliable isolation support in COVID-19 care settings, the proposed solution can help decrease the financial burden and increase the public health outcomes associated with COVID-19 disease management. The core robotics solution has an immediate addressable market of 11 million high-needs users in the U.S. alone, with projected revenues of roughly $1.65 Billion five years after product launch. Further commercialization opportunities come from licensing parts of the developed navigation technology for other robotics applications and developing an ecosystem of complementary products around the core robotics solution.This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project seeks to enable a new generation of assistive service robots that are comparable to commercial robots in performance, but significantly more affordable for individual use and personal care applications. The innovation adopts emerging visual positioning technologies from Augmented Reality to enable robust navigation for mobile robots using low-cost, consumer-grade electronics, while addressing a key limitation of visual positioning systems namely, that external lighting conditions and other changes in an environment can dramatically impact their performance. The innovation addresses these challenges via a combination of hardware and software that learns and stabilizes the highest value visual elements of the environment to maintain persistency across lighting conditions and long periods of time — a development critical to making assistive robots cost-effective for adoption at a large scale. Research objectives include: fully developing and integrating the visual persistency system, to achieve accurate and replicable robot navigation performance across a representative range of lighting conditions and visual characteristics of the target operating environments and benchmarking the resulting solution against state-of-the art technologies, to demonstrate its superior performance (i.e., it can successfully localize in at least 90% of cases where other solutions fail).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.