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From caretaking activities for elderly people to being assistive in healthcare setup, mobile and non-mobile robots have the potential to be highly applicable and serviceable. The ongoing pandemic has shown that human-to-human contact in healthcare institutions and senior homes must be limited. In this scenario, elderlies and immunocompromised individuals must be exclusively protected. Robots are a promising way to overcome this problem in assisted living environments. In addition, the advent of AI and machine learning will pave a way for intelligent robots with cognitive abilities, while enabling them to be more aware of their surroundings. In this paper, we discuss the general perspectives, potential research opportunities, and challenges arising in the area of robots in assisted living environments and present our research work pertaining to certain application scenarios, i.e., robots in rehabilitation and robots in hospital environments and pandemics, which, in turn, exhibits the growing prospects and interdisciplinary nature of the field of robots in assisted living environment.

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For the last four decades, the development of robotic hands has been the focus of several works. However, a small part of those approaches consider the exploitation of parallelism of FPGAbased (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) systems or discuss how using bioinspired optimization algorithms could improve the mechanical and controller components. This work considers developing a bioinspired robotic hand that achieves motion and force control with a logic hardware architecture implemented in FPGA intended to be replicated and executed with suitable parallelism, fitting a single device. The developed robotic hand prototype has five fingers and seven DoF (Degrees of Freedom). Using bioinspired optimization, such as PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization), both the rigid finger mechanism and the impedance controller were optimized and incorporated the results in several practical grasping experiments. The validation of this work is done with the Cutkosky grasping taxonomy and some grasping experiments with interference. The tests proved the proficiency of this works for a wide range of power and some precision grasp. The reader can see the experiments in the attached videos.

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