ADAM: a robotic companion for enhanced quality of life in aging populations.

One of the major problems of today's society is the rapid aging of its population. Life expectancy is increasing, but the quality of life is not. Faced with the growing number of people who require cognitive or physical assistance, new technological tools are emerging to help them. In this article, we present the ADAM robot, a new robot designed for domestic physical assistance. It mainly consists of a mobile base, two arms with grippers and vision systems. All this allows the performance of physical tasks that require navigation and manipulation of the environment. Among ADAM's features are its modularity, its adaptability to indoor environments and its versatility to function as an experimental platform and for service applications. In addition, it is designed to work respecting the user's personal space and is collaborative, so it can learn from experiences taught by them. We present the design of the robot as well as examples of use in domestic environments both alone and in collaboration with other domestic platforms, demonstrating its potential.

Sensor Fusion for Social Navigation on a Mobile Robot Based on Fast Marching Square and Gaussian Mixture Model.

Mobile robot navigation has been studied for a long time, and it is nowadays widely used in multiple applications. However, it is traditionally focused on two-dimensional geometric characteristics of the environments. There are situations in which robots need to share space with people, so additional aspects, such as social distancing, need to be considered. In this work, an approach for social navigation is presented. A multi-layer model of the environment containing geometric and topological characteristics is built based on the fusion of multiple sensor information. This is later used for navigating the environment considering social distancing from individuals and groups of people. The main novelty is combining fast marching square for path planning and navigation with Gaussian models to represent people. This combination allows to create a continuous representation of the environment from which smooth paths can be extracted and modified according to dynamically captured data. Results prove the practical application of the method on an assistive robot for navigating indoor scenarios, including a behavior for crossing narrow passages. People are efficiently detected and modeled to assure their comfort when robots are around.

A Multirobot System in an Assisted Home Environment to Support the Elderly in Their Daily Lives.

The increasing isolation of the elderly both in their own homes and in care homes has made the problem of caring for elderly people who live alone an urgent priority. This article presents a proposed design for a heterogeneous multirobot system consisting of (i) a small mobile robot to monitor the well-being of elderly people who live alone and suggest activities to keep them positive and active and (ii) a domestic mobile manipulating robot that helps to perform household tasks. The entire system is integrated in an automated home environment (AAL), which also includes a set of low-cost automation sensors, a medical monitoring bracelet and an Android application to propose emotional coaching activities to the person who lives alone. The heterogeneous system uses ROS, IoT technologies, such as Node-RED, and the Home Assistant Platform. Both platforms with the home automation system have been tested over a long period of time and integrated in a real test environment, with good results. The semantic segmentation of the navigation and planning environment in the mobile manipulator for navigation and movement in the manipulation area facilitated the tasks of the later planners. Results about the interactions of users with the applications are presented and the use of artificial intelligence to predict mood is discussed. The experiments support the conclusion that the assistance robot correctly proposes activities, such as calling a relative, exercising, etc., during the day, according to the user's detected emotional state, making this is an innovative proposal aimed at empowering the elderly so that they can be autonomous in their homes and have a good quality of life.