This article demonstrates a multidisciplinary approach that proposes to augment future caregiving by prolonged independence of older adults. The human–robot system allows the elderly to cooperate with small flying robots through an appropriate interface. ASPIRE provides a platform where high-level controllers can be designed to provide a layer of abstraction between the high-level task requests, the perceptual needs of the users, and the physical demands of the robotic platforms. With a robust framework that has the capability to account for human perception and comfort level, one can provide perceived safety for older adults, and further, add expressively that facilitates communication and interaction continuously throughout the stimulation. The proposed framework relies on an iterative process of low-level controllers design through experimental data collected from psychological trials. Future work includes the exploration of multiple carebots to cooperatively assist in caregiving tasks based on human-centered design approach.
Carebots
Thiago Marinho is a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his MS degree in Control and Automation Engineering from the Ecole Centrale de Lille, France. Current interests include control theory, state estimation and mobile robotics.
Christopher Widdowson is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received an MS degree in experimental psychology from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2014. Interests include virtual reality, 3D computer graphics, experimental design, and spatial cognition.
Amy Oetting is a PhD student in Computer Science - Human- Computer Interaction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Current interests include automation, robotics, and virtual reality.
Arun Lakshmanan is an MS student in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Interests include control theory and mobile robotics.
Hang Cui is a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Current interests include virtual reality, supervisory control, expressivity, and domestic robots.
Naira Hovakimyan is currently the W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. She received her M.S. degree in Theoretical Mechanics and Applied Mathematics in 1988 from Yerevan State University in Armenia and her Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics in 1992, from the Institute of Applied Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences. Research interests are in the theory of robust adaptive control and estimation, control in the presence of limited information, networks of autonomous systems, game theory and applications of those in safety- critical systems.
Ranxiao Frances Wang received her Ph.D from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999 in Computational Cognitive Sciences and is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois. Dr. Wang's research focuses on visual and spatial cognition, including how people encode and process spatial information during navigation; how humans perceive optic flow and make judgments about their locomotion; how the visual system temporally separates and integrates the continuous stream of optical stimulation to coherent percepts; how people recognize objects and scenes, and human spatial representations of higherdimensional objects and space.
Alex Kirlik received his BS, MS and Ph.D in Industrial & Systems Engineering from Ohio State University and is currently Professor of Computer Science and Member of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he served as Head of Human Factors for 5 years. His current research focuses on techniques for facilitating human-automation interaction. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed research articles. He is editor of Adaptive Perspectives on Human-Technology Interaction (OUP, 2006), editor of Human-Tech: Ethical and Scientific Foundations (OUP, 2010), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Engineering (2013).
Amy LaViers is an assistant professor in Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab. She will receive a CMA from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute in 2016, and received a PhD from Georgia Tech in 2013, an MS from Georgia Tech in 2010, and a BSE from Princeton in 2009. Her research interests are embodied movement theory and style in supervisory control systems for expressive robots. She is a 2015 DARPA Young Faculty Award recipient.
Dusan Stipanovic received his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Belgrade in 1994, and the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Santa Clara University in 1996 and 2000, respectively. Dr. Stipanovic had been a Research Associate in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University (2001-2004). In 2004 he joined UIUC where he is now Associate Professor in the ISE Department and CSL. His research interests include decentralized control and estimation, and dynamic games. Dr. Stipanovic served as an Associate Editor for IEEE TCAS I and II. Currently he is an Associate Editor for JOTA.
Marinho, T., Widdowson, C., Oetting, A., Lakshmanan, A., Cui, H., Hovakimyan, N., Frances Wang, R., Kirlik, A., Laviers, A., and Stipanović, D. (September 1, 2016). "Carebots." ASME. Mechanical Engineering. September 2016; 138(09): S8–S13. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.2016-Sep-5
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