The Roberta IRONSIDE project: A dialog capable humanoid personal assistant in a wheelchair for dependent persons
With an aging population and the financial difficulties of having a full time caregiver for every dependent person living at home, assistant robots appear to be a solution for advanced countries. However, most of what can be done with a robot can be done without it. So it is difficult to quantify what real value an assistant robot can add. Such a robot should be a real assistant capable of helping a person, whether indoors or outdoors. Additionally, the robot should be a companion for dialoging, as well as a system capable of detecting health problems. The Roberta Ironside project is a robotic evolution, embodying the expertise learned during the development of pure vocal personal assistants for dependent persons during the vAssist project (Sansen et al. 2014) The project proposes a relatively affordable and simplified design of a human sized humanoid robot that fits the requirements of this analysis. After an overall description of the robot, the justification of the novel choice of a handicapped robot in an electric wheel chair, this paper emphasizes the technology that is used for the head and the face and the subsequent verbal and non verbal communication capabilities of the robot, in turn highlighting the characteristics of Embodied Conversational Agents.
2016 2nd International Conference on Advanced Technologies for Signal and Image Processing (ATSIP)