ACT-R-typed human–robot collaboration mechanism for elderly and disabled assistance

Abstract

This work aims to propose an innovative mechanism of human-robot collaboration (HRC) for mobile service robots in the application of elderly and disabled assistance. Previous studies on HRC mechanism usually focused on integrating decision-making intelligence of human beings by qualitative judgment and reasoning intelligence of robots by quantitative calculation. Instead, novelties of the proposed methodology include (1) constructing an HRC framework by taking reference from the Adaptive Control of Thought -Rational (ACT-R) human cognitive architecture;(2) establishing semantic webs of cognitive reasoning through human-robot interaction (HRI) and HRC to plan and implement complex tasks; and (3) realizing human-robot intelligence fusion by mutual encouragement, connect, and integration of modules of human, robot, perception, HRI, and HRC in the ACT-R architecture. Its technical feasibility is validated by some selected experiments within a "pouring" scenario. Further, although this study is oriented to mobile service robots, the modularized design of hardware and software makes its extensive use feasible in other types of service robots like smart rehabilitation beds, wheelchairs, and cleaning equipments.

Human-machine-environment cyber-physical system and hierarchical task planning to support independent living

“…The "virtual HME-CPS" module acts as the core node of the data flow to collect sensory information, to communicate with the user, to conduct qualitative reasoning and quantitative calculation, to drive the actuators, and accordingly to integrate with the home environment. It is established by offline modeling and online synchronously updating with the real system using the augmented reality technique [9]. By interacting with the virtual system, the user can remotely access to environment perception and task monitoring and control by generating commands from and send commands to the virtual system, and can correspondingly operate the real environment relying on their synchronization.…”

“…Evidently, HMI covers multimedia information forms including text, graph, audio and video. For HMC, we have proposed an ACT-R (Adaptive Control of Thought -Rational) typed HMC mechanism in [9][11] to realize human-machine intelligence integration by a mutual encouragement, connect and integration of the modules of human, machine, perception, interaction, coupling and collaboration. Readers are referred to [9] [11] for further details.…”

“…An academic consensus to task planning of intelligent agents is [9][12]- [15] , owing to the complexity of the problem and unknowability of future events, task planning can be implemented hierarchically. For example, Qiu et al [12] stratified the task planning process to highleveled task planning and low-leveled motion planning.…”

“…The two layers were grounded by a fuzzy logic algorithm. In our previous humanrobot collaboration study [9] [11], semantic webs of cognitive reasoning were woven by the interaction of demand-driven factors and process-driven factors in the scenario of a "pouring task", which is a common-used case in intelligent agent (especially service robot) operation studies. In its human-robot collaborated decision-making mode, human cognition played a major role in handling comprehensive tasks like scene recognition, whereas robot cognition played a major role in handling concrete actions like motion control.…”

A Novel Mittag-Leffler Kernel Based Hybrid Fault Diagnosis Method for Wheeled Robot Driving System

“…In recent years, the wheeled robots have received a wide range of applications and developments [ 1 – 3 ]. Particularly, in home service area, various kinds of wheeled service robots have become members of our family, such as the elderly companion robot [ 4 ] and the sweeping robot [ 5 ]. However, robot users are usually nonexpert in robot technology, which means that the faults which occurred in the wheeled robot system may cause serious damage to their life and property.…”