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Applied Robotics Research

Service​​​​-robot solutions to empower senior citizens to achieve more and to enhance their lives　

The democratization of Artificial intelligence, making Artificial Intelligence available to everyone, is the direction that we should push. Robotics, a part of artificial intelligence, should also push this direction, the democratization of Robotics. Traditionally, robots, i.e., automation, have been used alone separated from the human environment, working toward the predefined highly specialized tasks under the supervision of the experts. The democratization pushes robots from the traditional isolated environments to the human environment for the daily-life tasks with the cooperation of ordinary people, of which domain referred to as service-robot. Among such democratized AI systems, what sets the democratized robots apart from other AI systems is that robot’s ability to provide physical assistance. Robots can help human physically, can cooperate human physically and can interact with human physically.

Seniors belong to one of those who need such physical assistance most. Our group’s mission is to develop service-robot solutions to empower seniors to achieve more and enhance their lives. Toward this mission, we set four research threads:

  • Service-robot manipulation (Learning-from-observation): the mission critical component to assist seniors at home is customization, i.e., the most difficult part is the different environment in each household. To absorb these environmental differences and perform the tasks in customized manner, we are developing the system, referred to as interactive learning-from-observation system, to learn what-to-do and where to do from human demonstrations and to execute the learned results on robot hardware based on the library of skill agents (how-to-do) so as for novice users to be able to customize those robots easily.
  • Service-robot HRI (opens in new tab): Service-robots, like other AI systems, need to interact with human. Here, the difference between service robots and other AI systems is that robots perform physical action. Namely, one of the central issues in service-robot HRI is to generation of gestures along robot interactions. We are working on designing a basic library for gesture generation, authoring tools, referred to as LabanSuite (opens in new tab), to get customized libraries from human gestures and handy DIY kit (opens in new tab) to represent such gestures
  • Service-robot navigation: Service-robots need to move around in each home environment. Since each home environment is different, we are developing a system that allows novice users to easily instruct those robots on the environment of each home using HoloLens MR system and their gestures.
  • Service-robot beyond the horizon: to go beyond the essential components and to explore new directions: