ALMI: Robotic Assistive Care for Ambient-assisted Living

Funding: Lloyd’s Register Foundation (£232,568.80) Duration: 06/2021 until 01/12/2022 Role: Co-Investigator

The latest survey from the International Federation of Robotics reports the sale of over 271,000 service robots worth USD 9.2 billion in 2018 alone. These sophisticated robots can perform many of the complex tasks required for beneficial applications from health and social care, critical infrastructure maintenance, and many other domains. Nevertheless, the adoption of robots in these applications is limited due to safety concerns associated with their deployment in open-world environments.

ALMI will demonstrate how novel robotic technology, environment monitoring capabilities, verification techniques, and adaptation methods can be integrated and applied to address these concerns for autonomous robots used in ambient assisted living solutions (i.e., solutions that employ technology to provide assistance to people in their regular living environment). To ensure that this ambitious objective is achievable, we will focus on a specific application. In this application, a TIAGo robot will provide long-term assistance (through speech interaction and help with physical tasks) to users with mild cognitive and motor impairments. Co-defined with Fundació ACE, a project partner who is a major dementia-care provider, this demonstrator will be representative for the robotic ambient assisted living domain, will be developed with input from, and will help advance robotics regulations and standards.