Aibo companion

DOAS – group 1Aitor Azcarate Onaindia

Abeer Mahdi

Zhiwei Zhan

Ning Yang

Supervisor: Frans Groen

Introduction

In the future more help is needed for elder care. The solution is to make use of intelligent home with

intelligent agents for interaction : for example Aibo We looked at the possibilities of Aibo as elder

companion We implemented some interesting tasks. (mentioned

later)

Tasks that should be realized by Aibo for elderly care

1.Sensing intelligence-Follow the elder-Detect when a person is falling down-Detect location

2. Communication intelligence -interaction with persons and nurse-interface with home equipments like tv.

3.Emotional intelligence-Face feature recognition-Initiate a conversation -Inactivate mode -Pro-active suggestions-Reaction to sound

System Architecture

Literature study

Following the elder, algorithms that can be used are:– Mean-shift algorithm– Optical flow motion– Sound direction detection– A combination of the above

Localization of Aibo– ‘map using’ methods– Appearance-based methods

Face recognition– Performance being evaluated

Aibo in the future – As the universal interface to the home equipment

Tasks implemented

We chose basic functions that can be extended in the future.

Reaction to sound– Make Aibo react to voice commands, by performing specific

tasks

Face detection– When seeing a face Aibo walks to the face and sits down

Pink Ball tracking– Make Aibo look for a pink ball and walk to it.

Available tools

Development tools– Openr SDK (c++ programming)– Tekkotsu (c++, java and matlab) – Remote framework (combined with visual c++)– R-code (script language, which we used)

Graphic user interface– Motion editor (creating new motions for Aibo)

Control panel– Sony entertainment player (control Aibo)

Reaction to sound

Aibo has a predefined voice command recognition list of 54 voice commands

We implemented some reactions to certain voice commands, some of these reactions are motions and others are voices that we recorded.

We experimented with Sony motion editor to create new motions, but we noticed that it doesn’t support Aibo ERS-7 very well.

Results

We noticed that Aibo sometimes cannot recognize the voice command correctly, despite the distance of the speaker.

--Demo

Face detection

R-Code has a predefined function for face detection

We implemented Aibo to detect a face, if found, Aibo will walk to it and sit down

Results

Aibo can detect faces correctly. However, in this stage it can only detect the

front side of the face. --Demo

Pink Ball tracking

R-Code has a predefined function for searching the Pink ball

This can be extended to follow the elder in the intelligent home

Result

The results are not accurate, this is because the basic functions are not accurate, for example the walk function. This can be caused by the physical construction of Aibo

Aibo can follow the pink ball correctly for an average of 4 times, after that it losses the ball.

The closer the ball is, the less chance of finding the ball.

Result (2)

--Demo pink ball

Conclusions

why we chose R-code– Simple script language to learn in a short time – Compact compared with for example Java, which take 400

lines of code to make Aibo nod it’s head (with R-code it is a few lines)

After experimenting with R-code, we noticed the following

– It is not an open source, that make it not extendable– It is not suitable for low level programming or academic use – The predefined functions are not very accurate

Conclusions (2)

Aibo is currently not capable of being the companion for the elders

– It is a nice entertainer but not really suitable for critical circumstances

– it would be more capable if aibo can interact with medical aids like nurses in the hospital

The things that should be done to make Aibo more suitable are

– Extend the voice recognition list– Improve the basic functions (e.g. walking)– Make a good API