— This paper presents an adaptive multi-agent approach based on coalitions for ambient assisted living applications. Adaptation is crucial because the challenge is to deal with a dynamic environment in order to provide adequate services to an elderly or a sick person at home. Moreover, it is necessary to take into account constraints such as degree of urgency of the service, intrusion level of the system and person’s privacy. Ethical dimension is then important for the acceptability of such applications. The evolution of the degree of intrusion based on the degree of urgency and the availability of the communication devices of the ambient environment are particularly targeted by considering ethical dimension. The results show that not only ethics consideration allows better acceptability of the system, but also the performances are improved.

Mobile robot localization consists in estimating the robot coordinates using real-time measurements. In ambient environment context, data can come both from the robot on-board sensors and from environment objects, mobile or not, able to sense the robot. The paper considers localization problem as a nonlinear bounded-error estimation of the state vector. The components of the state vector are the robot coordinates as well as the 2D position and orientation. The approach based on interval analysis can satisfy the needs of ambient environment by easily taking account a heterogeneous set and a variable number of measurements. Bounded-error state estimation can be an alternative to particle filtering which is sensitive to non-consistent measures, large measure errors, and drift of evolution model. The paper addresses the theoretical formulation of the set-membership approach and the application to the estimation of the robot localization. Additional treatments are added to the estimator in order to meet more realistic conditions. Treatments aim at reducing the effects of disruptive events: outliers, model inaccuracies or model drift and robot kidnapping. Simulation results show the contribution of each step of the estimator.

Mobile robot localization consists in estimation of robot pose by using real-time measurements. The Internet of Things (IoT) adds a new dimension to this process by enabling communications with smart objects at anytime and anywhere. Thus data used by localization process can come both from the robot on-board sensors and from environment objects, mobile or not, able to sense the robot. The paper considers localization problem as a nonlinear bounded-error estimation of the state vector whose components are the robot coordinates. The approach based on interval analysis is able to answer the constraints of IoT by easily taking account a heterogeneous set and a variable number of measurements. Bounded-error state estimation can be an alternative to other approaches, notably particle filtering which is sensible to non-consistent measures, large measure errors, and drift of robot evolution model. The theoretical formulation of the set-membership approach and the application to the estimation of the robot localization are addressed first. In order to meet more realistic conditions the way of reducing the effect of environment model inaccuracies, evolution model drift, outliers and disruptive events such as robot kidnapping is introduced. By integrating these additional treatments to the set-membership approach we propose a bounded-error estimator using multihypothesis tracking. Simulation results show the contribution of each step of the estimator. Real experiments focus on global localization and specific treatments for synchronizing measurements and processing outliers.

SUMMARY IMPLEMENTATION OF VISUO-MOTOR ANTICIPATORY SCHEMES IN TEILOPERATION A major issue in teleoperation is to try to reduce the gap that exists between the functioning of the human operator and that of the machine. The bionic approach, which consists of giving human properties to robots, is effectively a means of reducing the natural differences between the modes of functioning of these two entities, biological and mechanical. In the experimental study presented here, we implemented the visuo-motor anticipatory behaviour observed in locomoting humans using a teleoperated mobile robot. The ecological validity of such an implementation was empirically tested using a slalom route task, with independent experimental groups : the first one piloting a robot equipped with a camera that visually anticipated movement and the other one piloting a robot with a fixed camera. This « human-like » behaviour was also implemented using two different coupling modes. In the first mode, the orientation of the camera (on board the robot) was dependant on the direction of displacement of the robot, the operator controlling the latter (base mode). In the second mode, the direction of displacement was defined by the orientation of the camera, which was manipulated by the operator (camera mode). Experimental results show : 1 I that the operator is more efficient and seems much more at ease when a visuo-motor anticipatory scheme is implemented on the teleoperated device and 2 I that this effect is more pronounced in the camera mode. These results suggest that there is a case for introducing sensori-motor anticipatory « human-like » behaviour into artificial partially-automated teleoperated systems.

This paper presents the design and the implementation of general and adaptive framework for ambient assisted living applications. The challenge is to deal with a dynamic environment in order to provide an adequate service to an elderly or a sick person at home in a cooperative way. It is necessary to take into account constraints such as, the degree of urgency of the service and the intrusion degree of the system. The evolution of the degree of intrusion based on the degree of urgency and the availability of the different communication devices of the ambient environment are particularly targeted. Through an adaptive approach based on coalitions of agents, the multi-agents system ensures answers to various and/or unforeseen situations. The originality is to employ a declarative method for modeling the coalitions formation process by means of a rule-based system.

The robot, as technology of daily assistance to the person, may be considered only if its availability is compatible with the expected service. The useful operating time should be around eight hours per 24 hours. One of the major issues is the reliability of the autonomy of the robot. This objective can be achieved by relying on the principle of ambient robotics, defined as cooperation between the robot and ambient environment. The article focuses on the location of the robot and the person weakened at home or in institution such as EHPAD. The robot autonomous localization remains a function difficult to make reliable over a long period, in a badly modeled environment. The localization method is based on interval analysis applied to measures modeled by a bounded error. Evaluations with a simulated and real robot show the interest of this approach.

RGB-D sensor, like low cost Kinect, are widely used in robotics applications. Obstacle Avoidance (OA), Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM), Mobile Object Tracking (MOT) all are needing accurate information about the position of objects in the environment. 3D cameras are really convenient to realize those tasks but as low cost sensors, they have to be completed by other sensors : cameras, laser range finders, US or IR telemeters. In order to exploit all data sensors in a same algorithm, we have to express these data in a common reference frame. In other words we have to know the rigid transformation between sensor frames. In this paper, we propose a new method to retrieve rigid transformation (known as extrinsic parameters in calibration process) between a depth camera and a conventional camera. We show that such a method is accurate enough without the need of an user interaction nor a special calibration pattern unlike other common calibration processes.

Obstacle detection, representation and avoidance are crucial tasks for indoor and outdoor mobile robot navigation. A suitable representation of obstacles can improve the performance of obstacle avoidance. The objective of this paper is to develop a smooth representation of obstacles sensed by 2-D laser range finder in real time in unknown environments. The proposed method relies on line fitting methods while introduces a criterion to extract convex chain of an obstacle boundary. A cubic B-spline curve is then used to approximate the convexity of the obstacle boundary. We apply the proposed method to build a reactive collision avoidance task. The proposed method is validated with both simulation and experimental results of a mobile robot navigation task.

This paper combines the reactive collision avoidance methods with image-based visual servoing control for mobile robot navigation in an indoor environment. The proposed strategy allows the mobile robot to reach a desired position, described by a natural visual target, among unknown obstacles. While the robot avoids the obstacles, the camera could lose its target, which makes visual servoing fail. We propose in this paper a strategy to deal with the loss of visual features by taking advantage of the odometric data sensing. Obstacles are detected by the laser range finder and their boundaries are modeled using B-spline curves. We validate our strategy in a real experiment for an indoor mobile robot navigation in presence of obstacles.

In most of indoor mobile robot navigation, obstacle avoidance is a crucial task and should be reliable. Fusion of sources of data can be used to detect any obstacle shapes. Laser range finder is usually used to deal with this task in presence of simple obstacles. 3D sensors as Kinect provide 3D information which can be used for more complex obstacle detection. However, opposed to laser range finder, Kinect has strong limitations like measuring range or the field of view. This paper proposes a full calibration of different sensors which can be coupled with the Kinect sensor by Microsoft. The approach can also be applied to a large variety of 3D depth sensors like time-of-flight cameras, 3D LIDAR or RADAR. The basic idea is to compute the Euclidian transformation between each sensor. In this paper, we show that chessboard methods used to calibrate color cameras can be extended to deal with 3D depth sensors like Kinect. We show in a real experiment, the benefit of the fusion based on the calibration results, in order to detect complex obstacles reliably.

The work presented in this paper is focused on the design and the implementation of an adaptive framework for ambient assisted living applications. The challenge is to design an approach to deal with a dynamic environment in order to provide an adequate service to an elderly or a sick person at home. It's necessary to take into account constraints such as, the degree of urgency of the service and the degree of intrusion of the system. The evolution of the degree of intrusion based on the degree of urgency and the availability of the different communication devices that constitute the ambient environment are particularly targeted. Through an adaptive approach based on coalitions of agents, our multi-agents system ensures answers to various and/or unforeseen situations. Our coalitions protocol formation has been implemented in a real scenario in an ambient intelligence context. A more sophisticated version of our system has been designed allowing an intelligent and a declarative method for modeling the coalitions formation process. Indeed, the system has been doted with a rule-based system so that the reasoning implementing the coalitions formation process can be tuned in a declarative way by the user. Application objective: A mobile robot interacts and cooperates with communicating objects network to decline a set of services and teleservices in order to facilitate the daily life of the person and his entourage at home. Providing a multi-agent system which could be used for both evaluating the relevance of formation coalitions rules and implementing such rules. The proposed solutions have been implemented on a real system and evaluated in real situations. Several protocols for coalitions formation are being compared.

This work is about solving the global localization issue for mobile robots operating in large and cooperative environments. It tackles the problem of estimating the pose of a robot in the environment using real-time data either from the robot on-board sensors or/and from the sensors in the environment or/and the real-time data coming from other robots. The paper focuses on the 3-DOF localization of a mobile robot that is to say the estimation of the robot coordinates (x"m"r, y"m"r, @q"m"r) in a 2D-environment. The interest of this method lies on the ability to easily integrate a large variety of sensors, from the roughest to the most complex one. The method takes into account the following constraints: a flexible number of measurements, generic goniometric measurements, a statistical knowledge on the measurements limited to the tolerance, and the fact the measurements are acquired both from the robot onboard sensors and the environment sensors. The approach is able to integrate a heterogeneous set of measurements; not only generic goniometric measurements but also range, position given by a tactile tile, complex shape, and dead reckoning measurements. The way that outliers and environment model inaccuracies can be taken into account is described. The problem of nonlinear bounded-error estimation is viewed as a set inversion. The paper presents the theoretical formulation of the localization method in a bounded-error context and the parameter estimation based on interval analysis. Simulation results as well as real experiments show the interest of the method in a cooperative environment context.

This work tackles the problem of the localization of a robot in in large and cooperative environments using real-time data coming either from the robot onboard sensors or/and from the sensors in the environment. The paper focuses on the 3-DOF localization of a mobile robot that is to say the estimation of the robot coordinates (xmr, ymr, θmr) in a 2D-environment. The problem of nonlinear bounded-error estimation is viewed as a set inversion. The paper presents the theoretical formulation of the localization method in a bounded-error context and the parameter estimation based on interval analysis. Simulation results as well as real experiments show the contributions of the method. The method is able to easily integrate a large variety of sensors, from the roughest to the most complex one. The method takes into account a heterogeneous set of measurements, a flexible number of measurements, a statistical knowledge on the measurements limited to the tolerance, and the fact the measurements are acquired both from the robot onboard sensors and the environment sensors. The way that environment model inaccuracies can be taken into account is also presented.

The required objective for the design of a machine to be used by a human operator is its adaptation to the user’s capabilities. According to this logic, the ideal system should fit perfectly into the human sensori-motor loop. The system would disappear from the field of consciousness and the operator would use it as a “natural” extension to her/his own body. In order to complete this goal we first have to know what the human capacities of appropriation of an artefact are. This chapter proposes to answer this question from a review of a series of studies in the field of psychology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology and information technologies.

By primarily focusing on the perceptual information available to an organism and by adopting a functional perspective, the ecological approach to perception and action provides a unique theoretical basis for addressing the remote perception problem raised by telerobotics. After clarifying some necessary concepts of this approach, we first detail some of the major implications of an ecological perspective to robot teleoperation. Based on these, we then propose a framework for coping with the alteration of the information available to the operator. While our proposal shares much with previous works that applied ecological principles to the design of man-machine interfaces (e.g., ecological interface design), it puts a special emphasis on the control of action (instead of process) which is central to teleoperation but has been seldom addressed in the literature.

—The work presented in this paper is focused on the design and the implementation of an adaptive framework for ambient assisted living applications. The challenge is to provide an approach able to deal with a dynamic environment in order to provide an adequate service to the person. The evolution of the intrusion level of the system based on the degree of urgency and the availability of different communication devices that constitute the environment are particularly targeted. The results obtained with the coalition-based multi-agents system are promising and reflects these constraints.

The communicating objects of ambient environment can play a "facilitator" role in helping the assistive robot for locating itself, searching for a person... Conversely, the robot can be seen as a communicating object which is used by services to the person in loss of autonomy. We describe an architecture for cooperation between the robot and the ambient environment composed of sensors or actuators. One of the difficulties is that the robot is evolving in a crowded and not predictable physical environment. It is therefore necessary to have mechanisms of adaptation for answering to various or unforeseen situations so that the robot can move reliably in the home. It is necessary also to take into account two constraints, at first the degree of urgency of the service and secondly the degree of discomfort caused by the presence of a robot which is able to act near the person and see the person in her/his privacy.

One aim of ambient assistive technologies is to reduce long term hospitalization for elderly people, especially with pathologies such as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). The smart environment assists these people and their families with safety and cognitive stimulation, so they stay as long as possible at home. The originality comes from using the robot in the elderly person's home. This robot is remote controlled by a distant user, a therapist or a relative, for determining alarming situations or for participating in stimulation exercises. Several modes are available for controlling the robot. This paper deals with an assisted control mode in which the remote user gives to the robot one goal and the robot reaches the goal by itself. During the robot movement, the user can dynamically change the current goal. An important hypothesis is that the robot has no a priori knowledge of its environment at the beginning. The knowledge will increase with time and the planned trajectory will be refreshed at two levels: a local one - faster but not always sufficient - and a global one - slower but which always finds a path if one exists. The idea is to work only with local information, using the robot sensors, the operator keeping the high level control. To assure that control, the remote operator uses video feedback and information from a laser range scanner.

Many researches have been done in the field of assistive robotics in the last few years.The first application field was helping with the disabled people's assistance.Different works have been performed on robotic arms in three kinds of situations.In the first case, static arm, the arm was principally dedicated to office tasks like telephone, fax… Several autonomous modes exist which need to know the precise position of objects.In the second configuration, the arm is mounted on a wheelchair.It follows the person who can employ it in more use cases.But if the person must stay in her/his bed, the arm is no more useful.In a third configuration, the arm is mounted on a separate platform.This configuration allows the largest number of use cases but also poses more difficulties for piloting the robot.The second application field of assistive robotics deals with the assistance at home of people losing their autonomy, for example a person with cognitive impairment.In this case, the assistance deals with two main points: security and cognitive stimulation.In order to ensure the safety of the person at home, different kinds of sensors can be used to detect alarming situations (falls, low cardiac pulse rate…).For assisting a distant operator in alarm detection, the idea is to give him the possibility to have complementary information from a mobile robot about the person's activity at home and to be in contact with the person.Cognitive stimulation is one of the therapeutic means used to maintain as long as possible the maximum of the cognitive capacities of the person.In this case, the robot can be used to bring to the person cognitive stimulation exercises and stimulate the person to perform them.To perform these tasks, it is very difficult to have a totally autonomous robot.In the case of disabled people assistance, it is even not the will of the persons who want to act by themselves.The idea is to develop a semi-autonomous robot that a remote operator can manually pilot with some driving assistances.This is a realistic and somehow desired solution.To achieve that, several scientific problems have to be studied.The first one is human-machine-cooperation. How a remote human operator can control a robot to perform a desired task?One of the key points is to permit the user to understand clearly the way the robot works.Our original approach is to analyse this understanding through appropriation concept introduced by Piaget in 1936.As the robot must have capacities of perception 11 www.intechopen.com Remote and Telerobotics 192decision and action, the second scientific point to address is the robot capacities of autonomy (obstacle avoidance, localisation, path planning…).These two points lead to propose different control modes of the robot by a remote operator, from a totally manual mode to a totally autonomous mode.The most interesting modes are the shared control modes in which the control of the degrees of freedom is shared between the human operator and the robot.The third point is to deal with delay.Indeed, the distance between the remote operator and the robot induces communication delays that must be taken into account in terms of feedback information to the user.We will conclude this study with several evaluations to validate our approach.

In assistive robotics, a manipulator arm constitutes one possible solution for restoring some manipulation functions to victims of upper limb disabilities. The aim of this paper is to present a global strategy of approach of an assistive mobile manipulator (manipulator arm mounted on a mobile base). A manipulability criterion is defined to deal with the redundancy of the system. The aim is to keep the arm manipulable, i.e. capable of moving by itself. The strategy is based on human-like behaviour to help the disabled operator to understand the action of the robot. When the robot is far from its objective, only the mobile base moves, thus avoiding obstacles if necessary. When the objective is close to the robot, both mobile base and arm move and redundancy can be used to maximise a manipulability criterion. All the situations are tested separately and a global mission is realised in which all the previous situations are encountered. The partial results obtained with the real robot consolidate the results of simulation. This paper does not propose an autonomous path planning and navigation of the mobile arm but an assistance to the user for remote controlling it.