ROB-IN

Robot for continual personalized assistance able to explain itself

PHYSICAL HELP

Bringing objects to the users

Comparison icons created by Freepik - Flaticon

Social & Cognitive Interaction

  • Greeting
  • Chitchatting
  • Reminders
  • Calls to family
  • Life memory
Chatbot icons created by Freepik - Flaticon

Observation

  • Activities of daily living
  • Objects out of place
  • Episodic memory for user modelling
Eye icons created by Freepik - Flaticon

Training

  • Walking encouragement
  • Cognitive games
  • Performance observation
  • Support cues
Activity icons created by Freepik - Flaticon

PERSONALIZATION FRAMEWORK

To tailor the robot behaviour to the preferences of the different users, we will develop new hierarchical user models that will be used to propose new decision-making methods. The framework will provide not only a decision framework to execute and personalize the interactions for each one of the tasks but a mechanism to allow the robot to decide when during the day each task must take place.

Continual Dialogue Understanding

To take advantage of conversations, either initiated by the robot (scheduled) or by the user (unexpected), we will propose new methods for dialogue understanding. ROB-IN will not only be able to follow a conversation and extract relevant information to complete the user models and explainability, but also to continually adapt with respect to language expressions, conversational skills, actions and tasks among others. In result, the dialogue system should be able to continually improve its performance and quality. We will restrict the system to well-being related dialogues.

EXPLAINABILITY METHODS

To build trust and improve acceptance, we will develop new explainability methods so the robot can provide evidence of its internal states and reasons about its behavior, but more importantly, about the gathered data. New metrics will be proposed to effectively evaluate the user-studies outcomes. We will put special interest in ethical aspects and privacy.

Testimonials

We have worked with many clients and we always like to hear they come out from the cooperation happy and satisfied. Have a look what our clients said about us.

  • This project opens new frontiers in assistive services, allowing the professional caregivers to focus their efforts in actual value based assistance while the robots support in more routine tasks.

    Mr Jordi Picas

    CInO, SUARA

  • User-centric design is an aspect that we want to be transversal in all our research.

    Guillem Alenyà

    Director, Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial

Latest News

Latest news from the ROB-IN Project.

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IRI researchers Visit Suara

By Cristian Barrué on March 3, 2022

On March 3rd, a group of IRI researchers visited SUARA premises to continue the working session initiated at IRI. This interdisciplinary working session tried to narrow down the details of the tasks selected in the first session, like getting objects from the ground and handling them (e.g. glasses, keys, etc) or providing reminders. Special attention was given to the three fundamental research pillars that sustain the project, trying to find out all the dialogue topics related to the tasks, identifying the situations that would require explainability and portraying the personalization features of the specific tasks to make them comfortable for the elderly.

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Suara Caregivers Visit IRI

By Cristian Barrué on February 17, 2022

On Tuesday 17th, a group of professional caregivers from Suara visited the IRI laboratory to get to know the robots firsthand and be introduced to assistive robotics. During this visit, they were able to see the Tiago robot in action, navigating through the demonstrator flat or participating in cognitive games. After the visit, the Suara and IRI teams took part in an interdisciplinary working session to decide which tasks the robots could carry out to help the elderly and advance the three pillars of research that the ROB-IN project has as its flagship.

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Kick Off!

By Cristian Barrué on December 10, 2021

On the 10th of December 2021, the kick-off meeting of the ROB-IN project took place at the premises of the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics. Researchers from the different consortium members met to kick off the project and discuss the assistive tasks that the project robots were to perform during the pilots. The coordinators reviewed state of the art in assistive robotics over the last 15 years to assist in this exercise.

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