A Social Robot Assisting in Cognitive Stimulation Therapy

Abstract

Society is experiencing a series of demographic changes that can result in an unbalance between the active working and non-working age populations. One of the solutions considered to mitigate this problem is the inclusion of robots in multiple sectors, including the service sector. But for this to be a viable solution, among other features, robots need to be able to interact with humans successfully. This thesis seeks to endow a social robot with the abilities required for a natural human-robot interactions. The main objective is to contribute to the body of knowledge on the area of Human-Robot Interaction with a new, platform-independent, modular approach that focuses on giving roboticists the tools required to develop applications that involve interactions with humans. In particular, this thesis focuses on three problems that need to be addressed: (i) modelling interactions between a robot and an user; (ii) endow the robot with the expressive capabilities required for a successful communication; and (iii) endow the robot with a lively appearance.The approach to dialogue modelling presented in this thesis proposes to model dialogues as a sequence of atomic interaction units, called Communicative Acts, or CAs. They can be parametrized in runtime to achieve different communicative goals, and are endowed with mechanisms oriented to solve some of the uncertainties related to interaction. Two dimensions have been used to identify the required CAs: initiative (the robot or the user), and intention (either retrieve information or to convey it). These basic CAs can be combined in a hierarchical manner to create more re-usable complex structures. This approach simplifies the creation of new interactions, by allowing developers to focus exclusively on designing the flow of the dialogue, without having to re-implement functionalities that are common to all dialogues (like error handling, for example).The expressiveness of the robot is based on the use of a library of predefined multimodal gestures, or expressions, modelled as state machines. The module managing the expressiveness receives requests for performing gestures, schedules their execution in order to avoid any possible conflict that might arise, loads them, and ensures that their execution goes without problems. The proposed approach is also able to generate expressions in runtime based on a list of unimodal actions (an utterance, the motion of a limb, etc...). One of the key features of the proposed expressiveness management approach is the integration of a series of modulation techniques that can be used to modify the robot's expressions in runtime. This would allow the robot to adapt them to the particularities of a given situation (which would also increase the variability of the robot expressiveness), and to display different internal states with the same expressions.

Helping People Through Space and Time: Assistance as a Perspective on Human-Robot Interaction

“…In educational settings such as one-on-one tutoring (Kennedy et al, 2016;Fuglerud and Solheim, 2018;Kanero et al, 2018;van Minkelen et al, 2020) and classroom teaching (Kennedy et al, 2016;Ramachandran et al, 2016;Westlund et al, 2016;Polishuk and Verner, 2018;Ono et al, 2019;Rosenberg-Kima et al, 2019), a robot can deliver lectures in a similar manner to a human teacher. In therapeutic and medical settings, a robot can administer routine medical surveys (Varrasi et al, 2019) independent of the doctor's social biases (Briggs et al, 2015), provide therapy sessions for routine cognitive behavioral therapy (Dino et al, 2019) or physical therapy (Meyer and Fricke, 2017), and perform other general therapeutic tasks (Agrigoroaie et al, 2016;Fan et al, 2016;Salichs et al, 2018;Alimardani et al, 2020). Finally, a robot's assistance can vary based on its social role, such as a concierge robot performing different social behaviors when responding to children or adults (Mussakhojayeva et al, 2017), an advicegiving robot providing explanations when a user's behaviors become non-optimal (Gao et al, 2020) or a robot that gives cooking advice varying its strategies so that the advice is more readily received (Torrey et al, 2013).…”

Robot social como asistente de cocina

“…Este conjunto de habilidades permiten al usuario interactuar con el robot para entretenerse en el día a día. Ejemplos de este tipo de robots pueden ser Milow [4], Mini [5] o Pepper [6] entre otros.…”

Aplicación accesible de reproducción de música vía streaming para robot social

“…El trabajo que se presenta en este artículo consiste en el diseño e implementación de una aplicación de reproducción de música y podcast en el robot social Mini [19], robot creado por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid con la finalidad de ayudar a personas con deficiencia neurodegenerativa de cara a realizar actividades de estimulación cognitiva [18]. La evolución de dicho robot ha permitido integrar aplicaciones como juegos, agendas personales o reproductores de contenido multimedia.…”