Cloud-assisted cognition adaptation for service robots in changing home environments

Robots need more intelligence to complete cognitive tasks in home environments.In this paper,we present a new cloud-assisted cognition adaptation mechanism for home service robots,which learns new knowledge from other robots.In this mechanism,a change detection approach is implemented in the robot to detect changes in the user’s home environment and trigger the adaptation procedure that adapts the robot’s local customized model to the environmental changes,while the adaptation is achieved by transferring knowledge from the global cloud model to the local model through model fusion.First,three different model fusion methods are proposed to carry out the adaptation procedure,and two key factors of the fusion methods are emphasized.Second,the most suitable model fusion method and its settings for the cloud–robot knowledge transfer are determined.Third,we carry out a case study of learning in a changing home environment,and the experimental results verify the efficiency and effectiveness of our solutions.The experimental results lead us to propose an empirical guideline of model fusion for the cloud–robot knowledge transfer.

Individual difference of artificial emotion applied to a service robot

In order to enable personalized natural interaction in service robots, artificial emotion is needed which helps robots to appear as individuals. In the emotion modeling theory of emotional Markov chain model （eMCM） for spontaneous transfer and emotional hidden Markov model （eHMM） for stimulated transfer, there are three problems： 1） Emotion distinguishing problem： whether adjusting parameters of the model have any effects on individual emotions; 2） How much effect the change makes; 3） The problem of different initial emotional states leading to different resultant emotions from a given stimuli. To solve these problems, a research method of individual emotional difference is proposed based on metric multidimensional scaling theory. Using a dissimilarity matrix, a scalar product matrix is calculated. Subsequently, an individual attribute reconstructing matrix can be obtained by principal component factor analysis. This can display individual emotion difference with low dimension. In addition, some mathematical proofs are carried out to explain experimental results. Synthesizing the results and proofs, corresponding conclusions are obtained. This new method provides guidance for the adjustment of parameters of emotion models in artificial emotion theory.

Finding misplaced items using a mobile robot in a smart home environment

Smart homes can provide complementary information to assist home service robots.We present a robotic misplaced item finding(MIF)system,which uses human historical trajectory data obtained in a smart home environment.First,a multi-sensor fusion method is developed to localize and track a resident.Second,a path-planning method is developed to generate the robot movement plan,which considers the knowledge of the human historical trajectory.Third,a real-time object detector based on a convolutional neural network is applied to detect the misplaced item.We present MIF experiments in a smart home testbed and the experimental results verify the accuracy and efficiency of our solution.