Personal robot in an intelligent environment

Description of the Project

The last years an increasing effort is spent in research on service robots and entertainment robots which operate in natural environments and interact with humans www.science.uva.nl/~(the Sony AIBO robot, NEC Papero robot, etc)

Another recent development in the `services for humans' is that of Ambient Intelligence. This refers to a new paradigm in information technology, in which people are served by a digital environment that is aware of their presence and context, and is responsive to their needs, habits, gestures and emotions. But the question is whether the user is going to talk to his toaster or coffee machine... We think not.

As a part of the European project Ambience we developed a domestic robot which acts as a platform for natural interaction. The robot was some personification of the intelligent environment, and it was able to show intelligent behaviour, context awareness and natural interaction. The human user was able to have a seamless contact with the digital world by means of the robot, and the user was able to instruct the robot to do a simple navigation task, such as directing it to some location in the house.

The Control Architecture

The controller used by the robot is decomposed in several modules:

Thanks to the DML library developed by Philips each one of the modules of the controller was developed separatelly and could be executed in different computers (even using different operating systems).

Our task in this project was that of developing new robot localization algorithms using vision (i.e., the stero camera of the robot).

Partners

• Philips Research (coorditation of the project, hardware, basic software libraries, ...).
• Leuven University (navigation).
• Epictoid (emotion generation).

Research group members

• dr. ir. B. Kröse
• J.M. Porta
• Bas Terwijn

Funding