IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2023 - 11

CARE project, we are developing a mulirobot cooperation
system for welfare facilities and researching the design and
development of advanced assistive robots for homes and welfare
facilities by the year 2030.
This article presents a fundamental concept of multirobot
cooperation for welfare facilities within the framework of
CARE. The main contributions of this study are
■ An IoT integration system is designed to include different
passive and active assistive robots.
■ The safety and preferences of the user are considered with
input from individuals' interests, disabilities, and physical
status (self-efficacy).
■ A new concept of human-robot interaction is designed
with shared autonomy among assisting robots, humangiven
inputs, human safety, and assistive controllers.
■ A realistic Living Lab facility and scenarios are introduced
for experimenting with our proposed framework, and they are
evaluated for potential application through expert advice.
The article is organized as follows. In the " CARE: Cooperation
of AI Robot Enablers " section, we introduce the concept
of cooperation of AI robot enablers and discuss the details
regarding the assistance and automation level in the proposed
caregiving system. Next, " The Living Lab " section describes
the Living Lab facility at Tohoku University and explains different
Living Lab robots as assistive and service robots. The
interface between local and global intelligence is explained in
the " Web-Based Message Passing Interface for Robots Using
Robot Operating System " section. In the " Human Interaction
With AI " section, we explain human interaction with AI systems,
with a description of sensory systems and our developed
human detection, tracking, and condition evaluation system.
The " Multirobot Cooperation in Human-Friendly Environment "
section describes local intelligence by considering
multirobot cooperation with the coexistence of humans. The
" Experiments and Discussion " section explains an example
scenario demonstration for the proposed concept.
CARE: COOPERATION OF AI ROBOT ENABLERS
This section discusses the main idea of the developed framework
under the Moonshot Project. Our focus is on developing
multirobot collaboration while considering the human factor
for long-term intelligent assistance and support for humans by
utilizing new sensor development, sensor fusion, robotic assistance,
human-robot cooperation, and data processing. Our
aim is to develop an AI robotic care system that caters to the
needs of a specific user by providing the most relevant robotic
support as the user request for a certain task to be done. By
learning individual preferences and processing sensor data
over a long period, the AI can then recommend the best output
and provide support to the user by deploying and/or collaborating
with different robots. In contrast to other relevant projects
discussed earlier that have used SARs for long-term
support in homes and care facilities, our project has several
key features, summarized in Table 1. Our system can provide
appropriate support to the user by distributing tasks to multirobot
systems, where each robot can do a specific task.
MARCH 2023 IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE
11
TABLE 1. The comparison of different projects within the CARE framework.
PROJECT
CompanionAble [19] -
ASTROMOBILE [13] ✓
SERROGA [16]
Giraff.X [3]
-
✓
EnrichMe [2]
✓
Robot-Era [14], [15] -
STRANDS [17]
Smile [1]
✓
CARE (Ours)
-
✓
IoT INTEGRATION MULTIROBOT
-
-
-
-
-
✓
-
✓
✓
WALKER OR
WHEELCHAIR
SUPPORT
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
✓
✓
AUTONOMOUS
NAVIGATION
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
SPEECH
INTERACTION
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
-
✓
INDOOR,
OUTDOOR,
OR BOTH
Indoor
Indoor
Indoor
Indoor
Indoor
Both
Indoor
Both
Both
CONTINUOUS
MONITORING
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
REMOTE
OPERATION
✓
✓
✓
✓
-
✓
✓
✓
✓
SHARED
AUTONOMY
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
✓
✓
STATIC OR
DYNAMIC
SAFETY
ASSISTANCE
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
✓
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2023

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