HCC: Medium: Collaborative Research: Effective Communication with Robotic Assistants for the Elderly: Integrating Speech, Vision and Haptics

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。本研究的目的是开发一种通信接口，使老年人能够有效地与机器人助手交流，使他们能够以这种方式安全地生活在家中。拟议的通信接口将是：(1)多模式的，即支持口头，手势和身体互动，因为所有这些通常在人们彼此交流时同时发生；(2)自适应，使机器人助手能够适应老年人，而不是老年人适应机器人助手。语言、手势和身体互动（触觉）的结合只受到有限的关注，但它对于成功部署许多老年人的辅助机器人至关重要。本研究的变革部分是将触觉视为用户和机器人之间对话的驱动因素之一，并通过语言处理方法研究其与语音和手势的关系。为了适应每个用户，语音、手势和触觉信号的解释将通过RISq（通过索引和排序识别）来执行，这是一种新颖、自适应和可靠的识别方法。最后，将开发一种正式的模块化控制设计方法，以保证机器人安全可靠地响应对话处理提供的用户意图的解释。机器人辅助技术在未来前景广阔。支持老年人的独立活动，使他们能够安全地继续生活在社区中，这是至关重要的，特别是因为世界人口正在以越来越快的速度老龄化。然而，机器人助手广泛使用的主要障碍之一是缺乏易于老年人使用的界面，并允许机器人在复杂的现实环境中使用，如典型的公寓。拟议的研究旨在开发新的工具，使机器人开发人员能够填补这一空白。这项研究也可能对以机构为基础的卫生保健的提供产生重大影响。在医院和长期护理机构以及家庭中部署机器人来协助护理人员，对改善老年患者的健康结果和生活质量具有巨大影响，同时最大限度地降低护理成本。此外，这种机器人助手减少了护理工作量，有望缓解美国护理人员严重短缺的问题，这一问题预计只会恶化。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The purpose of this study is to develop a communication interface that will enable older people to effectively communicate with robotic assistants, allowing them in this way to remain living safely in their homes. The proposed communication interface will be: (1) multimodal, that is supporting spoken, gestural and physical interactions, as all these typically occur simultaneously when people communicate with one another, and (2) adaptive so that the robotic assistant will adjust to the older person rather than the older person to the robotic assistant. The combination of speech, gestures and physical interactions (haptics) has received only limited attention, but it will be critical for successful deployment of assistive robots for many elderly individuals. The transformative component of this research is to view haptics as one of the drivers of the dialogue between the user and the robot, and to study its relation to speech and gestures through language processing methods. To adapt to each user, the interpretation of the speech, gestures and haptic signals will be performed by means of RISq (Recognition by Indexing andSequencing), a novel, adaptive and reliable recognition methodology. Finally, a formal and modular control design methodology will be developed, that guarantees that the robot responds safely and reliably to the interpretation of the user intent provided by dialogue processing.Robot assistive technology holds great promise for the future. Supporting the independent functioning of older people so that they can safely remain living in the community is of paramount importance, especially since the world's population is aging at an ever increasing pace. However, one of the main obstacles to the widespread use of robot assistants is the lack of interfaces that are easy to use for the elderly and allow the robot to be used in complexreal-world environments such as a typical apartment. The proposed research aims to develop new tools that will enable robot developers to fill this void. The research could also have significant implications for the delivery of institutionally based health care. The deployment of robots to assist nursing personnel in hospitals and long-term care facilities, as well as at home, has enormous implications for improved health outcomes and quality of life for older patients while minimizing costs of care. Furthermore, the reduction of the nursing workload by such robot assistants promises to alleviate the critical shortage of nursing personnel in the USA that is only expected to worsen.