Abstract
Healthcare has a trend of going hi-tech. With an aging population growing more than ever, researchers and health care providers are now relying on robots to ease the symptoms of dementia and help an aging population stay where they would like, at home. Several therapeutic robots such as Paro recently introduced in the markets are manifestation of such trends. In this paper, we propose a social robot missioned to autonomously capture images of people and feed multimedia contents to a social network or to a hospital for various social activities or for health monitoring purpose. The main technical barriers of such robots include autonomous navigation, human face detection, distance, and angle adjustment for clean and better shots. To that end, we study autonomous mapping/navigation as well as optimal image capturing technology via motion planning and visual servoing. To overcome the mapping and navigation at a crowded environment, we use the potential field path planning harnessed with two competitive potential update techniques. The robot is an agent navigating in a potential field where detected environmental significances provide sources of attractive forces, while previously occupied locations estimated by SLAM technique provide sources of repelling forces. We also study visual servo technique to optimize image capturing processes. This includes facial recognition, photographic distance/angle adjustment, and backlight avoidance. We tested several scenarios with the assembled robot for its usefulness.
Highlights
According to a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, four out of five Internet users participate in some kind of group in the “real” world, compared with just 56 percent of those who do not use the Internet regularly [1]
We proposed Dali, a social robot, whose mission is to autonomously capture images of users and feed pictures and live motion clips to social networks or to hospitals for health monitoring purposes
To implement full autonomy in navigation we proposed a potential field based path planning
Summary
According to a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, four out of five Internet users participate in some kind of group in the “real” world, compared with just 56 percent of those who do not use the Internet regularly [1] Those figures rise to 82 percent for users of social networks and to 85 percent for users of Twitter. Many studies have addressed as to how social networking could affect people’s daily life and the usage of social media, especially for women, older adults, and parents. As a part of resolutions, Dali, the photographer, is proposed and developed to investigate the impact of a photographing social robot, to promote daily social networking, and to offer a breakthrough as an aging in place technology. We propose a solution to satisfy all of those criteria at the same time so that more people can be involved in online and offline social activities for happier life style
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