24 research outputs found
Enriching companion robots with enhanced reminiscence abilities
No full textIn this document I will go on discussing a project conceived by Professor Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese and Alessandro Russo, both researchers and developers of some of the main aspects of project Mario at CNR Rome.
MARIO is a robot, part of a robotics company called KOMPAÏ Robotics that deals with the production and management of Robots who take care of elderly people who suffer from dementia or who still need an aid; more generally speaking, there is talk of weak and lonely people within an organization and / or institutions (nursing homes ...) or in their own homes.
There are numerous characteristics of MARIO, which ultimately contribute to all those which are the manufacturing objectives of KOMPAÏ Robotics.
My project, or rather my contribution to MARIO, is to look for a specific method which let the robot show a specific set of photos to the user according to the expressions, feelings and emotions, the user will reveal.
Example: the robot randomly chooses a marriage photo and the user suddenly start to laugh and to express positive feelings with positive words; the robot will try to understand if it’s a good photo for the user or not, and in the first case will continue to show the same kind of pictures while in the second case, will change completely set of photos to be shown.
The pleasure of the subject expressed in relation to a photo must be subject to an index of interest between predefined and specified values that may be to show a certain interest in a picture or the subjects within the image or the situation that surrounds them
Subsidence of Artificial Reefs with Bamboo Foundations on a Soft Seabed
No full textThe design of artificial reefs must be based on the criteria of both durability and serviceability. In this respect, the seabed subsidence rate related to the weight of the reefs and of their foundation system should be limited. The horizontal drift of the reefs during their life should be small too. In this study, pertaining to the behavior of artificial reefs made of microsilica concrete and realized with foundations in bamboo near the international airport of Hong Kong, 1-year monitoring data and calculations of reef foundation settlements are shown and discussed to assess the performance of the adopted mixed foundation and to deduce the nature of the long-term subsidence. The subsidence related to the settlements of the foundations was monitored using a Multibeam Echo Sounder System. It was found that the observed subsidence rate cannot be justified by the primary consolidation of the soils forming the seabed. Indeed, secondary consolidation seems to play an important role. Overall, after one year of service, the artificial reefs are considered to be effective in terms of limitation of both subsidence and drift
Ontology-Based Knowledge Management for Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment and Reminiscence Therapy on Social Robots
No full textMARIO is an assistive robot that has to support a set of knowledge-intensive tasks aimed at increasing autonomy and reducing loneliness in people with dementia and supporting caregivers in their activity to assess patients’ cognitive status. Examples of knowledge-intensive tasks are the comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) and the delivery of reminiscence therapy. In order to enable these tasks, MARIO features a set of abilities implemented by pluggable software applications. MARIO’s abilities contribute to and benefit from a common knowledge management framework. For example, the ability associated with the CGA retrieves questions to be posed to the patient from the framework and stores the obtained answers and associated relevant metadata. In this work we presents the MARIO knowledge management software framework, which combines robotics with ontology-based approaches and Semantic Web technologies. It consists of (1) a set of interconnected and modularized ontologies, meant to model all knowledge areas that are relevant for MARIO abilities, and (2) a set of software interfaces that provide high-level access to the ontology network and its associated knowledge base. Finally, we demonstrate how the knowledge management framework supports the applications for CGA and reminiscence therapy, implemented on top of the knowledge base
A Knowledge Management System for Assistive Robotics
No full textIn this paper we demonstrate how to use an ontology network in order to fill the gap between knowledge and robots' abilities. The demonstration is focused on two components of the knowledge management system of MARIO robots. These components are the MARIO Ontology Network (i.e. MON) that organises knowledge in MARIO and an Object-RDF mapper, called Lizard, that dynamically generates APIs on top of the MON to enable the interaction between software components that implement robot's abilities and the MON itself
FOSSR Deliverable 4.4 - Development of the digital platform and integration with Open Cloud
No full textThe preparation and implementation of multimodal interviews requires the availability of a complex application capable of interfacing with different types of users: system administrators, users with access authorisation for field monitoring, interviewers and interviewees. The latter are put in contact with the system through a dedicated application, an interface that allows direct communication with the interviewees but which also supports more extensive functions, such as the view of the activities carriedout by each interviewee.On the main application side, the panel management and monitoring functions must be implemented, starting from the insertion of profiling data, but also the management of the interviews of each wave and the activity of the panellists.It is, therefore, a document necessary for the design and implementation phase of the main infrastructure management software in its part dedicated to the production of original data the social sciences, which takes into account the needs, the components already available, and the possible technical solutions that will support the final architecture of the product
Knowledge-driven Support for Reminiscence on Companion Robots
No full textIn this paper we present our work towards the development of an application for personalized reminiscence therapy in people with dementia. The reminiscence process aims at recalling personal memories by combining user-specific knowledge, dialogue-based human-robot interaction and multimedia content. The application is part of a robotic software framework for companion robots, investigated in the EU MARIO project and under evaluation in different dementia care settings
An Ontology Design Pattern for supporting behaviour arbitration in cognitive agents
No full textIn this paper we present an Ontology Design Pattern for the
definition of situation-driven behaviour selection and arbitration models
for cognitive agents. The proposed pattern relies on the descriptions and
situations ontology pattern, combined with a frame-based representation
scheme. Inspired by the affordance theory and behaviour-based robotics
principles, our reference model enables the definition of weighted relationships, or affordances, between situations (representing agent’s perception of the environmental and social context) and agent’s functional
and behavioral abilities. These weighted links serve as a basis for supporting runtime task selection and arbitration policies, to dynamically
and contextually select agent’s behaviour. The pattern is at the heart
of the behaviour-based cognitive approach adopted in the EU H2020
MARIO project for the design of an autonomous service robot (i.e., the
cognitive agent) to support elderly people with cognitive impairments
Autonomous comprehensive geriatric assessment
No full textThis paper presents the MARIO's CGA (Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment) module for the Kompaï platform that aims at autonomously performing and managing the execution of specific tests required in the CGA process. The application relies on the CGA ontology, which is part of the Mario Ontology Network (MON)4, as a support to the execution of the assessment process and a reference model for storing test information
A reference architecture for social robots
No full textSocial robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalized interaction with their users. Moreover, in this context recurrent software design issues such as ensuring interoperability, improving reusability and customizability of software components also arise. Designing and implementing social robotic software architectures is a time-intensive activity requiring multi-disciplinary expertise: this makes it difficult to rapidly develop, customize, and personalize robotic solutions. These challenges may be mitigated at design time by choosing certain architectural styles, implementing specific architectural patterns and using particular technologies. Leveraging on our experience in the MARIO project, in this paper we propose a series of principles that social robots may benefit from. These principles lay also the foundations for the design of a reference software architecture for social robots. The goal of this work is twofold: (i) Establishing a reference architecture whose components are unambiguously characterized by an ontology thus allowing to easily reuse them in order to implement and personalize social robots; (ii) Introducing a series of standardized software components for social robots architecture (mostly relying on ontologies and semantic technologies) to enhance interoperability, to improve explainability, and to favor rapid prototyping
The practice of self-citations: a longitudinal study
No full textIn this article, we discuss the outcomes of an experiment where we analysed whether and to what extent the introduction, in 2012, of the new research assessment exercise in Italy (a.k.a. Italian Scientific Habilitation) affected self-citation behaviours in the Italian research community. The Italian Scientific Habilitation attests to the scientific maturity of researchers and in Italy, as in many other countries, is a requirement for accessing to a professorship. To this end, we obtained from ScienceDirect 35,673 articles published from 1957 to 2016 by the participants to the 2012 Italian Scientific Habilitation, that resulted in the extraction of 1,379,050 citations retrieved through Semantic Publishing technologies. Our analysis showed an overall increment in author self-citations (i.e. where the citing article and the cited article share at least one author) in several of the 24 academic disciplines considered. However, we depicted a stronger causal relation between such increment and the rules introduced by the 2012 Italian Scientific Habilitation in 10 out of 24 disciplines analysed
