USING ROBOTIC SYSTEMS IN A SMART HOUSE FOR PEOPLE

WITH DISABILITIES

Viorel Stoian and Cristina Pana

CCMR Craiova - University of Craiova, Decebal Street No. 107, Craiova, Romania

Keywords: The assistive technology, smart house, robots and mobile robots, edutainment, robot control, artificial

potential field method.

Abstract: We present in this paper several ideas about the usability of the robotic arms and mobile robots as an

assistive technology in a smart house where people with disabilities daily live. First, psychological and

social aspects of smart home technology are presented and after that the modularity and standardization

processes are discussed. Next we propose a smart house plan, equipped with a mobile robot which has a

manipulator arm. This robotic system is used to help vulnerable persons, the handicapped men vehicle seat

being equipped with a robotic arm which can manipulate objects by a hyper-redundant gripper. For the

control of the processes in the smart house, we propose a hierarchical control system and for the mobile

robot we use the artificial potential field method. Also, this paper points out the edutainment concept

(EDUcation and enterTAINMENT) by robotics. Finally, some applications are presented.

1 INTRODUCTION

Technology can play a major role in assisting

process of the people in their daily life. Designing

smart environments is a goal that appeals to

researchers in a variety of disciplines, including

artificial intelligence, pervasive and mobile

computing, robotics, middleware and agent-based

software, sensor networks, and multimedia

computing (Cook, Das, 1989). Because smart

environment research is being conducted in real-

world, physical environments, design and effective

use of physical components such as sensors,

controllers, and smart devices are vital.

We define a smart environment as one that is

able to acquire and apply knowledge about the

environment and its inhabitants in order to improve

their experience in that environment (Youngblood et

al., 2005).

Systems are required to be robust and reliable as

the person with disabilities will rely on the installed

devices and they will become internalized within

their self-concept (Dewsbury, Edge, 2000, 2001),

(Lupton, 2000).

Some of the properties of the environment need

to be captured and they can be measured thus:

motion properties (position, velocity, angular

velocity, acceleration), presence (tactile/contact,

proximity, distance/range, motion), biochemical

(biochemical agents), physical properties (pressure,

temperature, humidity, flow), contact properties

(strain, force, torque, slip, vibration), identification

(personal features, personal ID) (Lewis, 2004).

The information required by smart environments

is measured by sensors and collected using sensor

networks. These sensor networks are responsible for

acquiring and distributing data needed by smart

buildings, utilities, industries, homes, ships, and

transportation systems. Sensor networks need to be

fast, easy to install and maintain, and self-

organizing.

There are many potential uses for a smart

environment. With the maturing of smart

environment technologies, at-home automated

assistance can allow people with mental and

physical challenges to lead independent lives in their

own homes. Pollack (Pollack, 2005) categorizes

such assistive technology as meeting the goals of

assurance (making sure the individual is safe and

performing routine activities), support (helping

individual compensate for impairment), and

assessment (determining physical or cognitive

status) (Cook and Das, 1989).

Pineau, et al. (Pineau, 2003) demonstrate the

benefits of robotic assistants in nursing homes, while

Helal, et al. (Helal, 2005) provide a visitor-

281

Stoian V. and Pana C. (2008).

USING ROBOTIC SYSTEMS IN A SMART HOUSE FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES.

In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, pages 281-286

DOI: 10.5220/0001502902810286

 SciTePress

identifying front door, inhabitant-tracking floor and

a smart mailbox to volunteer seniors living in the

Gator Tech Smart Home. Kautz, et al. (Kautz, 2002)

show that assistance is not limited to a single

environment. Using their activity compass, the

location of an individual can be tracked, and a

person who may have wandered off can be assisted

back to their goal (or a safe) location.

Finally, smart environments can be used to

actually determine the cognitive impairment of the

inhabitants. Carter and Rosen (Carter and Rosen,

1999) demonstrate such an assessment based on the

ability of individuals to efficiently complete kitchen

tasks.

While performance measures can be defined for

each technology within the hierarchical architecture,

performance measures for entire smart environments

still need to be established.

(Mann and Bendixen, 2007) makes a distribution

of the assistive technology in a smart house on eight

levels, from the lowest level (basic communications)

to eighth level (household arrangements).

Most people see robotics as being a vital technology

for providing society with the assistive solutions that

it needs in present and will need in the future. The

purpose of Assistive Technology (AT) is to provide

assistance, without to be a substitution for personal

care, to enable people to lead a better quality of life.

This technology was applied to devices for personal

use created specifically to enhance the physical,

sensory and cognitive abilities of people with

disabilities and to help them function more

independently in environments oblivious to their

needs (Story, Mueller and Mace, 1998). People with

disabilities are the principal beneficiaries of the

technological growth.

2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF SMART

HOME TECHNOLOGY

The use of technology appears to present dramatic

compromises in social activities, role definition, and

identity (Gitlin, 1995).

Approximately all older persons and people with

disabilities might feel that they are not included in

discussions on technology, as it is perceived as

irrelevant to their needs.

Isolation is a major problem for any person who

is older or has a debilitating disability (Marshall

2000).

People who are incapacitated in some way are at

the mercy of others to provide the simple basic

needs. People who do not have disabilities should

not to be concerned with food, shelter or human

contact as they are part of every day life. It is there

essential that people with disabilities are not given

substandard care packages that do not meet their

needs in all areas: social, psychological, physical,

social and emotional. Similarly, care packages

should not be over technologies so that the person is

reduced to being the slave of technology (Dewsbury,

Edge and Taylor, 2001; Dewsbury, 2001).

3 EDUTAINMENT BY ROBOTICS

FOR PEOPLE WITH

DISABILITIES

Edutainment is a neologism with is derived from the

expression “EDUcation by enterTAINMENT”

(Muscato and Longo, 2003). It means “Learning and

playing”. In the edutainment systems or products are

included different elements that have been designed

to teach or to train persons and at the same time to

entertain those persons. For young people with

disabilities is very important to learn reading and

writing. In the future is very important toad to these

processes initiation and learning new assistive

technology and devices (computer science, internet,

telecommunications, robotics, flexible automation

etc.) with will be present inside each smart home.

Edutainment has a great success, especially, to

young people. A person with disabilities can get

through 5 levels of the edutainment which cover a

large period of time, from pre-school level to

researchers’ and practitioners’ level: pre-school,

kindergarten, school, university, and applications/

research (Stoian, Bizdoaca and Pana, 2006). On the

last level the researchers design systems and

applications for the others levels.

4 MODULARITY AND

STANDARDIZATION

(Virk, 2003) focuses on the state of play of

component modularity and standardization in a

number of application sectors that have good

potential for adopting the robotics technology in the

near future. In a smart house for people with

disabilities there are many and different

technological systems. Because the design of such

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mechatronic systems is very complex, is necessary

to split this design problem into specific areas of

mechanics, sensor systems, actuators and powering

systems, communication interfaces and hardware

and software components of the computing process.

In this mode is easier to develop a generic

methodology.

The modular design methodology supposes to

enable the individual modules to be designed as

black boxes that interact with one another via an

interaction space (data buses, intelligent actuators,

intelligent sensors, intelligent power supply,

mechanics, and controllers). The design process

should include aspects of standardization so that

wider issues of open components can be determined.

This can be done by looking for specific application

areas and establishing the status in each from the

viewpoint of where the technologies are and what

the status as regards standards is and what are the

future requirements.

5 A PROPOSAL FOR A SMART

HOUSE DESIGN

Here we propose a map of a smart house where live

vulnerable people (Figure 1). HMVS means

Handicapped Men Vehicle Seat and MR means

Mobile Robot. These devices with locomotion

facilities are controlled by smart systems (controllers

or computers) and implement some methods or

algorithms lake in Section 7.

Figure 1: A smart house map.

The external areas can be compound from

garden, terrace, drive way, entrance, and stairs. The

internal areas can be termed circulation and external

for the others and can be compound from: kitchen,

living room, bedroom, bathroom, and general. This

area has minimal physical barriers between the

rooms. Technological systems could be allocated to

these functional areas. Some systems (for example,

motorized windows or doors), may be the same

(physically and functionally) in more than one

functional area. This is especially the case for people

with long-term degenerative conditions whose

quality of life can be enhanced by judicious

introduction of this technology (Edge, Taylor,

Dewsbury and Groves, 2000).

Systems map to one or more rooms (functional

areas). A system that is not mapped to any

functional area is not required. Also many of these

systems will interact with each other. Some systems

may be sufficiently interconnected that they would

be better treated as two parts of one bigger system.

It is concluded than that there are two basic types

of mapping: either a system will map to one or more

rooms (functional areas) or a functional area will

map to one or more systems.

6 THE MOBILE ASSISTANT

ROBOTS

In this section we propose two solutions which

presuppose the use of the robotic systems. First, we

propose the installation of a robotic arm on the

handicapped men vehicle seat (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Handicapped men vehicle seat with robotic arm.

This arm can execute different actions and

different functions which the vulnerable persons are

USING ROBOTIC SYSTEMS IN A SMART HOUSE FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

283

deprived of. It is endowed with a hyper-redundant

gripper. The gripper can manipulate different objects

with different forms (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The hyper-redundant gripper of the arm.

Second, we propose a mobile robot with

anthropomorphic arm which is endowed with an

anthropomorphic manipulator (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Mobile robot with anthropomorphic arm.

This device can run inside of internal and

external areas and can satisfy many needs of the

resident. For example, it can grip and bring a cup of

tee, milk or coffee.

7 MOBILE ROBOT CONTROL

BY ARTIFICIAL POTENTIAL

FIELD METHOD

7.1 The Artificial Potential Field

Approach

In order to avoid the difficulties associated with the

dynamical model, the control law is based only on

the gravitational potential and a new artificial

potential. It is shown that to drive the mobile robot

to a desired point in an unconstrained movement is

necessary the artificial potential to be a potential

functional whose point of minimum is attractor for

the system. Also, this method is used for a

constrained movement in the environment with

obstacles. The target position is represented by an

artificial attractive potential field and obstacles by

corresponding repulsive fields, so that the trajectory

to the target can be associated with the unique flow-

line of the gradient field through the initial position

and can be generated via a flow-line tracking

process. This approach is suitable for real-time

motion planning of robots since the algorithm is

simple and computationally much less expensive

than other methods based on global information

about the task space. It is difficult in the artificial

potential field framework to regulate the transient

behaviour of the generated trajectories such as the

movement time to the target and the shape of the

velocity profile. For example, even if the potential

function without local minima is used, it is difficult

to estimate the movement time required for reaching

beforehand.

Potential field was originally developed as on-

line collision avoidance approach, applicable when

the robot does not have a prior model of the

obstacles, but senses them during motion execution

(Khatib, 1986). Using a prior model of the

workspace, it can be turned into a systematic motion

planning approach. Potential field methods are often

referred to as “local methods”. This comes from the

fact that most potential functions are defined in such

a way that their values at any configuration do not

depend on the distribution and shapes of the

obstacles beyond some limited neighbourhood

around the configuration. The potential functions are

based upon the following general idea: the robot

should be attracted toward its goal configuration,

while being repulsed by the obstacles.

In order to make the robot be attracted toward its

goal configuration, while being repulsed from the

obstacles, ∏ is constructed as the sum of two

elementary potential functions:

∏(x) = ∏

(x) + ∏

(x) (1)

where: ∏

(x) is the attractor potential and it is

associated with the goal coordinates and it

isn’t dependent of the obstacle regions.

∏

(x) is the repulsive potential and it is

associated with the obstacle regions and it

isn’t dependent of the goal coordinates.

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In this case, the force F(t) is a sum of two

components: the attractive force and the repulsive

force:

F(t) = F

(t) + F

(t) (2)

7.2 Attractor Artificial Potential Field

The artificial potential is a potential function whose

points of minimum are attractors for a controlled

system. It was shown (Takegaki and Arimoto, 1981;

Douskaia, 1998; Masoud, and Masoud, 2000; Tsugi,

Tanaka, Morasso, Sanguineti and Kaneko, 2002, Mohri,

Yang,

and Yamamoto, 1995) that the control of robot

motion to a desired point is possible if the function

has a minimum in the desired point. The attractor

potential ∏

can be defined as a functional of

position coordinates x in this mode:

∏

(x) =

()

[]

∑

+−

iin

Tiii

xkxxk

(3)

The function ∏

(x) is positive or null and attains

its minimum at x

, where ∏

) = 0. ∏

(x) defined

in this mode has good stabilizing characteristics

(Khatib, 1986), since it generates a force F

that

converges linearly toward 0 when the robot

coordinates get closer the goal coordinates:

(x) = k(x – x

) (4)

Asymptotic stabilization of the robot can be

achieved by adding dissipative forces proportional to

the velocity

7.3 Repulsive Artificial Potential Field

The main idea underlying the definition of the

repulsive potential is to create a potential barrier

around the obstacle region that cannot be traversed

by the robot trajectory. In addition, it is usually

desirable that the repulsive potential not affect the

motion of the robot when it is sufficiently far away

from obstacles. One way to achieve these constraints

is to define the repulsive potential function as

follows (Latombe, 1991):

⎪

⎩

⎪

⎨

⎧

≤

⎟

⎠

⎞

⎜

⎝

⎛

−

=Π

ddif0

ddif

(x)

(5)

where k is a positive coefficient, d(x) denotes the

distance from x to obstacle and d

is a positive

constant called distance of influence of the obstacle.

In this case F

(x) becomes:

⎪

⎩

⎪

⎨

⎧

≤

∂

⎟

⎠

⎞

⎜

⎝

⎛

−

ddif0

ddif

(x)

(x)F

(6)

For those cases when the obstacle region isn’t a

convex surface we can decompose this region in a

number (N) of convex surfaces (possibly

overlapping) with one repulsive potential associated

with each component obtaining N repulsive

potentials and N repulsive forces. The repulsive

force is the sum of the repulsive forces created by

each potential associated with a sub-region.

We propose the mobile robot to move from

initial point (x, y) = (0, 0) to final point (x

, y

) = (7,

5). If any obstacles are not between the two point,

the trajectory is a straight line. If we consider that

there is a dot obstacle, in the point (x

, y

) = (4, 3),

with

distance of influence d

= 0.4, the trajectory is

like in Figure 5.

Figure 5: The constrained robot trajectory by one obstacle.

8 CONCLUSIONS

Most people see robotics as being a vital technology

for providing society with the assistive solutions that

it needs in present and will need in the future. The

purpose of Assistive Technology (AT) is to provide

assistance, without to be a substitution for personal

care, to enable people to lead a better quality of life.

This technology was applied to devices for personal

use created specifically to enhance the physical,

sensory and cognitive abilities of people with

disabilities and to help them function more

independently in environments oblivious to their

needs. People with disabilities are the principal

beneficiaries of the technological growth.

USING ROBOTIC SYSTEMS IN A SMART HOUSE FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

285

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