Methodology for robot mapping and navigation in assisted living environments

In our societies, the number of senior citizens living on their own is increasing steadily. The lack of permanent attention results in the late detection of emergency situations. Labour-intensive care is already a high burden for the society, therefore it seems reasonable to promote technology that helps to detect and react in case of emergency situations that elderly people may encounter.In the last decade, assistive environments have been established by integrating surveillance devices into the living environments giving remote operators access to monitor the senior inhabitant at home for detecting emergency situations. However, due to poor privacy in terms of intrusion into the private life of an elderly person, there will be an unfavourably low acceptance of such systems.This paper introduces a two-stage strategy and proposes to replace a possibly large number of humancontrolled monitoring devices by a single autonomous mobile system. The first stage will be performed by the autonomous system to detect an emergency situation. The human operator will be obligatory only at the final stage when the system assumes that an emergency has occurred and the final evaluation of the situation is required. The self-assessment will reduce the human factor related to privacy issues.

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“…3). Details of such experiments can be found in [17] and [28]. Two significant examples with respect to naviga tion shall be presented here.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using an autonomous robot to maintain privacy in assistive environments

Armbrust¹,

Mehdi²,

Reichardt³

et al. 2011

Security Comm Networks

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“…3) If a cell is not occupied or free in any of the sensors' arrays, then its counter in the combined grid map is set to 0. Further details of the mapping can be found in [13]. Being a service robot, ARTOS should precisely know its location in the environment.…”

Section: A Mapping and Localisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Use of an Autonomous Mobile Robot for Elderly Care

Berns

Mehdi

2010

2010 Advanced Technologies for Enhancing Quality of Life

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Abstract-In our societies, there is a steady increase in the elderly population. These people need a constant supervision to perform simple tasks at their homes, which is sometimes not possible. This lack of permanent attention sometimes results in the late detection of emergency situations. Therefore, it is judicious to promote technology that helps to detect and react in case of emergency situations. In the last decade, monitoring devices have been installed in the home environments for the surveillance of the inhabitant. However, due to poor privacy there will be an unfavourably low acceptance of such systems. Another approach to the problem is to develop mobile robots for elderly care. In this scenario, a mobile robot has to navigate from place to place to search for the elderly person. Navigating inefficiently in the home environment may delay the process of searching. This paper focus on the aspect of enhancing navigational efficiency of the robot that would speed up the task of finding human being in the unstructured and dynamic household environment. To achieve precision in searching the human, a behaviour based Markov decision process (MDP) along with a detailed representation of the environment as a grid map have been developed on a small sized indoor autonomous mobile robot, ARTOS.

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“…As discussed in [7], two forms of maps are being generated using laser scanner and the sonar sensors. These maps are merged together in a global map to generate the complete information of the environment.…”

Section: Mapping and Localisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Detailed discussion about Mapping and Navigation can be found in [7] 3.2 Navigation and Path Planning ARTOS can be tele-operated by caregivers to inspect the elderly person at home. There are two ways to control the robot remotely.…”

Section: Mapping and Localisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ordering of Robotic Navigational Tasks in Home Environment

Mehdi

Berns

2010

Communications in Computer and Information Science

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Abstract. Autonomous navigation is an essential component of an indoor mobile robot. For an interactive user experience the robot should be able to understand multiple navigational tasks and perform them as optimally as possible. User may issue multiple random destinations to the robot to reach in a scenario like nding the elderly person, but to navigate randomly may result in an inefcient robot manoeuvring and may delay the process of nding the elderly person in the environment. To enhance the navigational efciency, ordered and organised navigation based on certain cost function is required. In this paper, we are focusing on the need of organisation of navigational tasks keeping in view the unstructured and dynamic nature of the home environment. To achieve speed and accuracy in navigation, a detailed representation of the environment and a better evaluation of the cost function to organise the tasks is required. Navigation is based on grid map generated using laser scanner and sonar sensors mounted on the small sized indoor robot, ARTOS. The Navigational Cost is used for organising the tasks and is computed using A* algorithm to determine path to the destination.

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Methodology for robot mapping and navigation in assisted living environments

Cited by 10 publications

References 9 publications

Using an autonomous robot to maintain privacy in assistive environments

Using an autonomous robot to maintain privacy in assistive environments

Use of an Autonomous Mobile Robot for Elderly Care

Ordering of Robotic Navigational Tasks in Home Environment

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