Professor Dusan Stipanovic creates robots to assist seniors

According to a 2014 U.S. Census Bureau study, there are expected to be approximately 80 million people aged 65 and over in the United States by 2050. A growing senior population means a growing need for healthcare and help in the home.

To address this need, a group of University researchers, including ISE professor Dušan Stipanović, have developed a project called ASPIRE (Automation Supporting Prolonged Independent Residence for the Elderly) that aims to create personal robots and drones to assist senior citizens in their homes and perform helpful tasks such as retrieving medications.

ASPIRE, which recently received a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, is led by mechanical science and engineering professor Naira Hovakimyan. The research group’s primary objective is to help senior citizens by studying autonomous vehicles and their interactions with humans.

“In this particular case, it’s more of a case study of human-autonomous interactions that have not been explored. And also collision avoidance — this is not being explored,” Stipanovic said. “People are talking a lot about it but we are still far away from really having 100% secure collision avoidance for vehicles, and especially putting that in a human sense.”

Stipanović, whose background is in electrical engineering, said his main contribution to the research will be working on controlling the vehicles in a safe way — which means getting them from point A to point B without collisions with other objects.

Stipanović is a member of a sub-team specializing in collision avoidance, along with Venanzio Cichella and Thiago Marinho, PhD students of Professor Hovakimyan. The team is publishing a paper titled “Collision Avoidance Based on Line-of-Sight Angle: guaranteed safety using low-cost sensors.” The goal of the paper is to formulate control laws to achieve collision avoidance using limited information about an obstacle, obtained from small, low-cost sensors. Stipanović, whose background is in electrical engineering, says his main contribution to the research will be working on controlling the vehicles in a safe way — which means getting them from point A to point B without collisions with other objects.

ASPIRE’s main goal, Stipanović said, is to help the senior citizen population. He said this will include studying the interaction between autonomous vehicles and humans and making sure users are comfortable with this relationship.

“There’s the psychological perception that the vehicles are going to be around you . . . many people would have problems with it,” Stipanovic said. “. . . I think it has to be done respectfully, and it has to be done keeping in mind that we don’t want to dehumanize the whole care of anybody in need.”

Stipanović explained how ethical and psychological issues come into play when dealing with human-robot interactions, which raises his own personal concerns.

“Being very careful in learning what the elderly, and in general, humans, would feel comfortable with, that autonomous vehicles can be around, and pretty much listening to that; I would say personally that that would be a big issue for me,” he said.

The fact that not much has been explored in this area of research leaves much work to be done. Stipanović said that ASPIRE’s research is still in its starting stages.

Looking toward the future, Stipanovic said his overall vision for ASPIRE is to develop a project that has a primary focus in helping senior citizens. He explained how it is often easy for researchers to get lost in the details of their work, causing them to lose sight of their initial goals.

“The issue is, if you want to do this, if you’re going to be helping elderly people, then help them. I think science today should be more along those lines,” he said. “. . . If this is the proposal we wrote, this is the proposal we want to do, then it is about the elderly and at the end we want to help them.”

Figures: First, we simulate the drones in a virtual reality environment and test the efficacy of the algorithm when the autonomous flying robots and the human subject are required to cooperate and interact. This allows us to study how the comfort level of humans (measured using biometric sensors) varies with respect to a set of control design parameters which can be tuned at will. Figure 1 and 2 depicts the virtual reality environment we developed. Second, we implement the control strategy on drones to conduct real flight tests in our indoor lab at IRL, CSL (Figure 3).

FOR FURTHER READING
“As Aging Population Grows, So Do Robotic Health Aides.” New York Times.
 

 

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