United States

As the demands on health and social care increase so too does the pressure on the carers we rely on to provide that care. However, as demand increase we risk placing too much burden on the care sector. This talk discusses the deployment of a humanoid robot to a day center catering for guests suffering with dementia with the aim of supporting the center staff to run group activities.

IEEE RO-MAN 2021

Exploring the Applicability of the Socially Assistive Robot Stevie in a Day Center for People with Dementia

robot humanoid dementia stevie health social care

**About**
 The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

 PETRA (which means “stone” in Greek) addresses important human living needs. From a technological perspective, PETRA motivates and inspires new scientific thrusts, innovations and discoveries to improve living environments, a particularly important issue, in an increasingly crowded and complex world where the need for inclusiveness and connectivity with the rest of the world is key. For the elderly in particular, PETRA addresses the fact that, as people grow older; they will increasingly rely on technology to be able to prolong staying in their homes and enjoy an independent life.

 The PETRA 2021 proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the ACM ICPS program. The ISBN number assigned to PETRA '21 is 978-1-4503-8792-7

PETRA 2021

The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

panel

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. This theme also touches upon people's expectations and perceptions of robots, as well as other social, cognitive and cultural factors that will influence human-robot interactions. We will have a special session/track on this topic, invite targeted submissions and include plenary speakers who are specialist in this area. We sincerely hope that this focus will help enlighten the design-thinking of all of us as we fabricate and program our own various systems.

To access RO-MAN Virtual 2021, [please register here.](https://ro-man2021.org/registration/)

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. 

In this work, we have developed an autonomous robotic assistant for the task of blood suction in robotic surgery. This system was demonstrated to improve surgical performance and reduced cognitive demands compared to the manual teleoperation of the suction. Moreover, the system was tested in a user study. In this, the autonomy collaborated with the user to complete a surgical task. This study allowed us to identify key collaboration aspects required for an effective autonomous blood suction system.

Multi-camera Torso Pose Estimation using Graph Neural Networks

We conducted a household study over the course of seven months, during which the commercially available Anki Vector robot was introduced to eight demographically diverse private homes for participants’ free use. Based on our findings, we conclude that the adoption process of personal companion robots slightly differs from that of functional vacuum cleaning robots, but may not differ substantially from technology adoption processes in general.

Human Social Feedback for Efficient Interactive Reinforcement Agent Learning

We are presenting a theory-driven approach to studying situated trust in HRI
by focusing on the experience of vulnerability. As a first proof-of-concept study, we conducted an interactive online survey that demonstrates that it is possible to measure human experience of vulnerability in the ordinary, mundane, and familiar situation of clothes shopping with a robot.

The robot may not notice my discomfort  Examining the Experience of Vulnerability for Trust in Human-Robot Interaction

The work presented evaluates distances in tactile Human-Drone Interaction.
A user study was conducted, in which a miniature-sized drone approached participants from four directions. With future scenarios at home or work in mind, the study was carried out in a seated position. The users were left the choice to engage in physical interaction by stopping the quadrotor by tapping to the quadrotor's frame or to stop it using a provided foot switch to provide more insights about their inhibition threshold.

B1: Evaluating Distances in Tactile Human-Drone Interaction

Formal verification receives increased importance since the complexity of safety-critical technical applications steadily increases. In our work, we describe an approach for symbolic model checking of collaborative robotic systems against safety properties. In particular, our methodology enables verification under system modifications and adaptive behavior generally represented as variability. Architectural, behavioral and environmental models are correspondingly abstracted to reach a balance of generality and verifiability with reasonable effort. By the use the model of a collaborative assembly use case we formally verify the existence of mechanical clamping hazards between the robot’s moving end effector and static environment objects.

Robot-Assisted Mindfulness Practice: Analysis of Neurophysiological Responses and Affective State Change

We used an attention based deep Neural Network to predict the motion of a human during a handover task with a robot. We study the accuracy of the model during different phases of the handover operation.

A Humanoid Social Agent Embodying Physical Assistance Enhances Motor Training Experience

In this work we present a kinematics model for the humanoid robot Pepper. The model is based on analytical solutions of the inverse kinematics, which provide very accurate and fast results. It is envisioned to be used in a human-humanoid pose matching imitation system as it allows for translation of human joint positions to robot joint angles while maintaining the angle configuration of the body pose.

Analytical Solution of Pepper’s Inverse Kinematics for a Pose Matching Imitation System

We investigate two extensions to our grounded word-learning system to increase transparency. The first extension uses deictic gestures (i.e., pointing) to interact with users. The second extension visualizes the current state of the lexicon on the robot's tablet. We performed a user study (n=32) to evaluate the system. In a quantitative analysis, we did not see a performance increase for the extensions, but found other benefits. In a qualitative analysis, we identified challenges for word-learning systems.

Monocular 3D object detection for an indoor robot environment

Skill imitation has been an important ability in
human-robot collaboration since it allows expeditious robot
teaching of new tasks. To mimic the human
pose, inverse kinematic solvers have been used to endow kinematic
structures with human-like motion. Nevertheless, these
solutions tend to be formulated for a specific robot or task. To
address this generalization issue, this work presents the ICONS
framework for imitation constraints, which proposes a general
formulation for pose imitation, paired with a computationally
efficient solver.

ICONS: Imitation CONStraints for Robot Collaboration

An appropriate user interface to collect human demonstration data for deformable object manipulation has been mostly overlooked in the literature. We present an inter-action design for demonstrating cloth folding to robots. Users choose pick and place points on the cloth and can preview a visualization of a simulated cloth before real-robot execution. Two interfaces are proposed: A 2D display-and-mouse based GUI, and a 3D Augmented Reality interface where the chosen points are placed by hand gestures.

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