PRE2019 4 Group1

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Group members

Name Student ID Department
Bryan Buster 1261606 Psychology and Technology
Edyta W. Koper 1281917 Psychology and Technology
Sietze Gelderloos 1242663 Computer Science and Engineering
Matthijs Logemann 1247832 Computer Science and Engineering
Bart Wesselink 1251554 Computer Science and Engineering

Problem statement and objectives

With about one-third of the world’s population living under some form of quarantine due to the COVID-19 outbreak [1], scientists sound the alarm on the negative psychological effects of the current situation [2]. Studies on the impact of massive self-isolation in the past, such as in Canada and China in 2003 during the SARS outbreak or in west African countries caused by Ebola in 2014, have shown that the psychological side effects of quarantine can be observed several months or even years after an epidemic is contained [3]. Among others, prolong self-isolation may lead to higher risk of depression, anxiety, poor concentration and lowered motivation level [2]. The negative effects on well-being can be mitigated by introducing measurements which help in the process of accommodation to a new situation during the quarantine. Such measurements should aim at reducing the boredom (1), improving the communication within a social network (2) and keeping people informed (3) [2]. With the following project, we propose an in-house assistant that addresses these three objectives. Our target group are the elderly who needs to stay home in order to practice social distancing.

User needs

Having defined our main objectives, we can further specify the assistant's functionalities, which are tailored to our target group. In order to facilitate the accommodation of the assistant, we have focused on users' daily life activities. Research has shown that the elderly most often engage in activities such as books reading, TV/DVDs/videos watching, socialising and physical exercises[4]. Moreover, as we do not want to expose our prospective users to unnecessary stress attributed to the introduction of new technology, we have examined the use of computers and the Internet. It has been shown that the most common computer uses among the elderly are: (1) Communication and social support (email, instant messaging, online forums); (2) Leisure and entertainment (activities related to offline hobbies); (3) Information seeking (health and education); (4) Productivity (mental stimulation: games, quizzes)[5]. Additionally, we have added two extra activities: meditation and listening to musics, as they have been shown to bring significant social and emotional benefits for the elderly in social isolation[6][7].

Considering our objectives and findings from the literature, we have identified four users needs and proposed functions for each category. The overview is presented below.

User needs 2.png

Approach

In order for us to tackle the problem as described in the problem statement, we will start with careful research on topics that require our attention, like how and where we can support the mental and physical health of people. From this research, we can create a solution consisting of different disciplines and techniques.

From there, we will start building an assistant that has the following features:

  • Speech:
    • Text to speech (TTS): being able to interact with an assistant via speech is a key part of the assistant, to tackle the loneliness problem. Using hardware microphones and pre-existing software, we can create a ‘living’ assistant.
    • Speech to text (STT): being able to talk back to the assistant sparks up the conversation, and makes the assistant more human-like.
  • Tracking: the robot has functionalities that enable it to look towards a human person when it is being activated.
  • Exercising: to counter the lack of physical activities, the robot has functionalities that can prompt or motivate the user to be physically active, and to track the user’s activity.
  • General information: the robot prompts the user to hear the latest news twice every day, once in the morning and once in the evening. Users can always request a new update through a voice command.
  • Graphical User Interface: when the user is unable to talk to the assistant, there will be an option to interact with a graphical user interface, displayed on a touch screen.
  • Vision: skeleton tracking, facial detection. Use this data to count jumping jacks, look at someone when talking to. (Closely linked with navigation)

Using different feature sets allows our team members to (partly) work individually, speeding up the development process in the difficult time that we are in right now. The parts should be tested together. Not only in the end, but also when building. This can be done by scheduling meetings with the person responsible for building the physical robot. The team members can share code via a source like GitHub, which then can be uploaded onto the robot, allowing members to test their part.

When all parts work together, a video will be created, highlighting all bot functionalities.

Deliverables

By the end of the project, we will deliver the following items:

  • Project Description (report via wiki)
  • Project Video demonstrating functionalities
  • Physical assistant
  • Source code

Milestones

Week Deliverable
1 (April 20th till April 26th) Problem statement, think of concept
2 (April 27th till May 3rd) Further research, list of required components
3 (May 4th till May 10th) Power delivery finished, performed all research and acquire components/software for construction
4 (May 11th till May 17th) Finish physical construction
5 (May 18th till May 24th) -
6 (May 25th till April 31th) Finish software
7 (June 1st till June 7th) Finish integration and test with prospective user
8 (June 8th till June 14th) Create presentation, finish Wiki
9 (June 15th till June 21th) Presentation, on Wednesday

State of the Art

Indoor localisation and navigation

Indoor localisation has become a highly researched topic over the past years. A robust and compute-efficient solution is important for several fields of robotics. Whether the application is an automated guided vehicle (AGV) in a distribution warehouse or a vacuum robot, the problem is essentially the same. Let us take these two examples and find out how state-of-the-art examples solve this problem.

Logistics AGVs

AGVs for use in warehouses are typically designed solely for use inside a warehouse. Time and money can be invested to provide the AGV with an accurate map of its surroundings before deployment. The warehouse is also custom-built, so fiducial markers [8] are less intrusive than they would be when placed in a home environment. These fiducial markers allow Amazon’s warehouse AGVs to locate themselves in space very accurately. Knowing their location, Amazon’s AGVs find their way around warehouses as follows. They send a route request to a centralised system, which takes into account other AGVs’ paths in order to generate an efficient path, and commands the AGV exactly which path to take. The AGV then traverses the grid marked out with floor-mounted fiducial markers. [9] The AGVs don’t blindly follow this path, however, as they keep on the lookout for any unexpected objects on their path. The system described in Amazon’s relevant patents[8][9][10][11] also includes elegant solutions to detect and resolve possible collisions, and even the notion of dedicated larger cells in the ground grid, used by AGVs to be able to make a turn at elevated speeds.

Robotic vacuum robots

A closer-to-home example could be found when looking at Irobot’s implementation of VSLAM (Visual Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping) [12] in their robotic vacuum cleaners. SLAM is a family of algorithms intended for vehicles, robots and (3d) scanning equipment to both localise themselves in space and to augment the existing map of their surroundings with new sensor-derived information. The patent[12] involving an implementation of VSLAM by Irobot describes a SLAM variant which uses two cameras to collect information about its surroundings. It uses this information to build an accurate map of its environment, in order to cleverly plan a path to efficiently clean all floor surfaces it can reach. The patent also includes mechanisms to detect smudges or scratches on the lenses of the cameras, and notify the owner of this fact. Other solutions for gathering environmental information for robotic vacuum cleaners use a planar LiDAR sensor to gather information about the boundaries of the floor surface. [13]

SLAM algorithms

TODO


Human - robot interaction

Socially assistive robotics

Socially assistive robots (SARs) are defined as an intersection of assistive robots and socially interactive robots [14]. The main goal of SARs is to provide assistance through social interaction with a user. The human - robot interaction is not created for the sake of interaction (as it is the case for socially interactive robots), but rather to effectively engage users in all sorts of activities (e.g. exercising, planning, studying). External encouragement, which can be provided by SARs, has been shown to boost performance and help to form behavioural patterns [14]. Moreover, SARs have been found to positively influence users’ experience and motivation [15]. Additionally, due to limited human-robot physical contact, SARs have lower safety risks and can be tested extensively. Ideally, SARs should not require additional training and be flexible when it comes to the user’s changing routines and demands. SARs not necessarily have to be embodied; however, embodiment may help in creating social interaction [14] and increases motivation [15].

Social behaviour of artificial agents

Robots that are intended to interact with people have to be able to observe and interpret what a person is doing and then behave accordingly. Humans convey a lot of information through nonverbal behavior (e.g. facial expression or gaze patterns), which in many cases is difficult to encode by artificial agents. This fact can be compensated by relying on other cues such as gestures or position and orientation of interaction [16]. Moreover, human interaction seems to have a given structure that can be used by an agent to break down human behavior and organize its own actions.

Voice recognition

Robots that want to interact with humans need some form of communication. For the robot we are designing one of the means of communication will be audio. The state of the art voice recognition systems use learning neural networks[17] together with natural language processing to process the input and to learn the voice of the user over time. An example of such a system is the Microsoft 2017 conversational speech recognition system.[18] The capabilities of such system are currently limited to only be able to understand literal sentences and thus its use will be limited to recognizing voice commands.

Speech Synthesis

To allow the robot to respond to the user a text to speech system will be used. Some examples of such systems that are based on Deep Neural Networks include, Tacotron[19], Tacotron2[20] and Deep Voice 3[21]. The current state of the art makes use of end-to-end variant where these systems get trained on huge data sets of (English) voices to create a human like voice. This system can then be fed text input which it will turn into speech as an output. These systems are not always as equally robust and thus newer system focus more on make the already high performing system more robust, an example being Fastspeech[22]


Ethical Responsibility

The robot that we are designing, will be interacting with human people, specifically elderly in this case. This raises questions, what tasks can we let a robot perform, without causing the user to lose human contact. For this, several research papers have been conducted that establish an ethical framework [23] [24].

Next to that, research has also been conducted about what to expect in a relationship with a robot, which is what the elderly will engage in[25][26]. If we want to make the robot persuade the human into physical activities, it is import that we look at how this can be persuasive [27].

References

  1. ↑ Infographic: What Share of the World Population Is Already on COVID-19 Lockdown? Buchholz, K. & Richter, F. (April 3, 2020)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Psychological Impact of Quarantine and How to Reduce It: Rapid Review of the Evidence Brooks, S. K., Webster, R. K., Smith, L. E., Woodland, L., Wessely, S., Greenberg, N., & Rubin, G. J. (2020)
  3. ↑ Depression after exposure to stressful events: lessons learned from the severe acute respiratory syndrome epidemic. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 53(1), 15–23 Liu, X., Kakade, M., Fuller, C. J., Fan, B., Fang, Y., Kong, J., Wu, P. (2012)
  4. ↑ https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Su_Yen_Chen/publication/233269125_Leisure_Participation_and_Enjoyment_Among_the_Elderly_Individual_Characteristics_and_Sociability/links/5689f04908ae1975839ac426.pdf\Leisure Participation And Enjoyment Among The Elderly: Individual Characteristics And Sociability (Chen & Fu, 2008))
  5. ↑ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563210000695\Computer use by older adults: A multi-disciplinary review. (Wagner, Hassanein & Head, 2010)
  6. ↑ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197457205003794/Integrative Review of Research Related to Meditation, Spirituality, and the Elderly. (Lindberg, 2005)
  7. ↑ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-006-9024-3/Uses of Music and Psychological Well-Being Among the Elderly. (Laukka, 2006)
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 US20160334799A1: Method and System for Transporting Inventory Items, Amazon Technologies Inc, Amazon Robotics LLC. (Nov 17, 2016) Retrieved April 26, 2020
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 CA2654260: System and Method for Generating a Path for a Mobile Drive Unit, Amazon Technologies Inc. (November 27, 2012) Retrieved April 26, 2020.
  10. ↑ US8220710B2: System and Method for Positioning a Mobile Drive Unit, Amazon Technologies Inc. (July 17, 2012) Retrieved April 26, 2020.
  11. ↑ US20130302132A1: System and Method for Maneuvering a Mobile Drive Unit, Amazon Technologies Inc. (Nov 14, 2013) Retrieved April 26, 2020.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 US10222805B2: Systems and Methods for Performing Simultaneous Localization and Mapping using Machine Vision Systems, Irobot Corp. (March 5, 2019) Retrieved April 26, 2020.
  13. ↑ US10162359B2: Autonomous Coverage Robot, Irobot Corp. (Dec 25, 2018) Retrieved April 26, 2020.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Defining socially assistive robotics. Feil-Seifer D., (2005)
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Attitudes Towards Socially Assistive Robots in In- telligent Homes: Results From Laboratory Studies and Field Trials. Torta, E., Oberzaucher, J., Werner, F., Cuijpers, R. H., & Juola, J. F. (2013)
  16. ↑ Etiquette: Structured Interaction in Humans and Robots. Ogden B. & Dautenhahn K. (2000)
  17. ↑ Amodei, D., Ananthanarayanan, S., Anubhai, R., Bai, J., Battenberg, E., Case, C., ... & Chen, J. (2016, June). Deep speech 2: End-to-end speech recognition in english and mandarin. In International conference on machine learning (pp. 173-182)
  18. ↑ Xiong, W., Wu, L., Alleva, F., Droppo, J., Huang, X., & Stolcke, A. (2018, April). The Microsoft 2017 conversational speech recognition system. In 2018 IEEE international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing (ICASSP) (pp. 5934-5938). IEEE
  19. ↑ Yuxuan Wang, RJ Skerry-Ryan, Daisy Stanton, Yonghui Wu, Ron J Weiss, Navdeep Jaitly,Zongheng Yang, Ying Xiao, Zhifeng Chen, Samy Bengio, et al. Tacotron: Towards end-to-endspeech synthesis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.10135, 2017
  20. ↑ Jonathan Shen, Ruoming Pang, Ron J Weiss, Mike Schuster, Navdeep Jaitly, Zongheng Yang,Zhifeng Chen, Yu Zhang, Yuxuan Wang, Rj Skerrv-Ryan, et al. Natural tts synthesis byconditioning wavenet on mel spectrogram predictions. In 2018 IEEE International Conferenceon Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pages 4779–4783. IEEE, 2018.
  21. ↑ Wei Ping, Kainan Peng, Andrew Gibiansky, Sercan O. Arik, Ajay Kannan, Sharan Narang,Jonathan Raiman, and John Miller. Deep voice 3: 2000-speaker neural text-to-speech. InInternational Conference on Learning Representations, 2018.
  22. ↑ Ren, Y., Ruan, Y., Tan, X., Qin, T., Zhao, S., Zhao, Z., & Liu, T. Y. (2019). Fastspeech: Fast, robust and controllable text to speech. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 3165-3174)
  23. ↑ Robot carers, ethics, and older people. Sorell T., Draper H., (2014)
  24. ↑ [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5751968 Socially Assistive Robotics . Feil-Seiver D.., Mataric M., (2011)]
  25. ↑ An Ethical Evaluation of Human–Robot Relationships. De Graaf M., (2016)
  26. ↑ Review: Seven Matters of Concern of Social Robots and Older People. Frennert S., (2014)
  27. ↑ Robotic Nudges: The Ethics of Engineering a More Socially Just Human Being. Borenstein J., (2016)
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