Recent studies in social robotics show that it can provide economic efficiency and growth in domains such as retail, entertainment, and active and assisted living (AAL). Recent work also highlights that users have the expectation of affordable social robotics platforms, providing focused and specific assistance in a robust manner. In this paper, we present the AMIRO social robotics framework, designed in a modular and robust way for assistive care scenarios. The framework includes robotic services for navigation, person detection and recognition, multi-lingual natural language interaction and dialogue management, as well as activity recognition and general behavior composition. We present AMIRO platform independent implementation based on a Robot Operating System (ROS). We focus on quantitative evaluations of each functionality module, providing discussions on their performance in different settings and the possible improvements. We showcase the deployment of the AMIRO framework on a popular social robotics platform—the Pepper robot—and present the experience of developing a complex user interaction scenario, employing all available functionality modules within AMIRO.

Action recognition plays an important role in various applications such as video monitoring, automatic video indexing, crowd analysis, human-machine interaction, smart homes and personal assistive robotics. In this paper, we propose improvements to some methods for human action recognition from videos that work with data represented in the form of skeleton poses. These methods are based on the most widely used techniques for this problem—Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Initially, the paper explores and compares different ways to extract the most relevant spatial and temporal characteristics for a sequence of frames describing an action. Based on this comparative analysis, we show how a TCN type unit can be extended to work even on the characteristics extracted from the spatial domain. To validate our approach, we test it against a benchmark often used for human action recognition problems and we show that our solution obtains comparable results to the state-of-the-art, but with a significant increase in the inference speed.

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Robust action recognition methods lie at the cornerstone of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems employing optical devices. Using 3D skeleton joints extracted from depth images taken with time-of-flight (ToF) cameras has been a popular solution for accomplishing these tasks. Though seemingly scarce in terms of information availability compared to its RGB or depth image counterparts, the skeletal representation has proven to be effective in the task of action recognition. This paper explores different interpretations of both the spatial and the temporal dimensions of a sequence of frames describing an action. We show that rather intuitive approaches, often borrowed from other computer vision tasks, can improve accuracy. We report results based on these modifications and propose an architecture that uses temporal convolutions with results comparable to the state of the art.

Human action recognition has a wide range of applications, including Ambient Intelligence systems and user assistance. Starting from the recognized actions performed by the user, a better human–computer interaction can be achieved, and improved assistance can be provided by social robots in real-time scenarios. In this context, the performance of the prediction system is a key aspect. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a neural network approach based on various types of convolutional layers that can achieve a good performance in recognizing actions but with a high inference speed. The experimental results show that our solution, based on a combination of graph convolutional networks (GCN) and temporal convolutional networks (TCN), is a suitable approach that reaches the proposed goal. In addition to the neural network model, we design a pipeline that contains two stages for obtaining relevant geometric features, data augmentation and data preprocessing, also contributing to an increased performance.