Cognitive assistive robotics for the elderly and the physically challenged

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Progress witnessed in medicine and health care over the past decades has increased life expectancy but has led to an aging society, a good portion of which involves elderly and disabled individuals who are in dire need for direct physical assistance and day to day care. This has induced skyrocketing costs associated with the services and care provided to them. We explore in this proposal an alternative to minimize some of these costs and to alleviate the burden on the health care providers by developing a class of intelligent machines termed as cognitive assistive robotic systems, the main task of which is to support and provide basic needs and assistance for an elderly/disabled individual. To impart natural interaction capabilities with humans, these systems need to have cognitive features allowing them to recognize to a certain extent human intentions, to predict human behavior under certain circumstances and to respond adequately to some basic requests made by the human user. The robotic system designed should be able to store knowledge and to learn useful skills from humans. Development of an assistive robotic system in which the intelligence is not entirely hand-coded requires extensive exploitation of existing advanced robotics and mechatronics technologies and the development of new types of algorithms and human-machine interactions systems allowing for seamless and almost-natural interaction with humans where perception, reasoning, and action planning capabilities are key factors. To deal with such challenges and to fulfill the goal of designing a cognitive assistive robotic system, the proposed research integrates within a flexible framework a number of modules involving machine attention, natural man-machine interaction, behavioral and incremental learning and action planning. These are all fields pertinent to the applicant's expertise. The proposal tackles a number of issues in the maturing and evolving field of cognitive assistive robotics. It should lead to excellent opportunities for the advancement of knowledge in this field, the training of highly qualified personnel and could also potentially lead to commercially viable alternatives in the field of service robotics (of assistive nature) whether for hospital or home use.