Let Us Help You: The Development of Intelligent Robots as Effective Assistants for Society

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The world is currently experiencing a silver tsunami: rapid population aging. Robots will have a significant impact on society in order to meet the urgent needs of an aging population. In this research program, we will address the open challenge of incorporating intelligent service robots into society as long-term assistants to manage and perform multiple assistive activities in human-centred environments. This research will aim to make immediate breakthroughs to overcome the single task restriction of current service robots by equipping them with the perception and cognition needed to perform complex interactive behaviours. These behaviours will be pertinent to assisting multiple non-expert human users in numerous tasks in varying real-world settings. ******Aim 1 will develop embodied social intelligence for robots initiating and sustaining assistive interactions with humans. Sub-Aim 1.1 will uniquely identify and classify both human intent and affective (emotions and moods) cues to allow a robot to recognize complex human social behaviours during human-robot interaction (HRI). Both feature extraction and decision level fusion will be considered to classify social cues in order to determine accurate real-time multi-modal classification methods using probabilistic models. Sub-Aim 1.2 will address the challenge of a robot autonomously learning appropriate behaviours for assistance with multiple activities while also personalizing interactions. Learning will rely on the robot being able to perceive complex human social cues by considering the inherent uncertainty that exists when interacting with people in real-world settings.******Aim 2 will develop novel HRI control architectures to allow multiple robots to cooperate with each other and users in order to provide multi-task assistance in social settings. Sub-Aim 2.1 will uniquely integrate social norms and person-centred care principles to facilitate effective learning of robot team cooperative assistive behaviours while ensuring focus is on user wellbeing. Sub-Aim 2.2 will develop a novel hierarchical multi-activity planning method for robot teams to allow real-time responsiveness to user, environment and activity changes in HRI settings. Activity planning will consider situations where robots will each have different goals or cooperate together to achieve the same common goal. ******The proposed Aims will be addressed within a centralized framework. New transformative knowledge will be generated in robot intelligence and control, multi-robot cooperation and HRI. The research will contribute to accelerating innovation within the robotics ecosystem, supporting the urgent need to strengthen made-in-Canada robotic technologies, and ensure Canada's role in this rapidly growing global market. A central outcome of this program will also be preparing HQP for successful careers in the multi-billion dollar service robotics industry.*****