Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Safety.
The aim of service robots is supporting persons in carrying out
activities of daily life in normal contexts. This means the human-robot
interaction and cooperation and the running both inside specific environments
and in public areas induce also questions related to safety (existing regulations
related to safety impose limits to the systems and to the workspace that often
prevent robots from running in contexts different from industrial ones). For
this reason it is fundamental to focus researches in this field both on
conceiving novel strategies and designing new components that increase the
safety and the reliability of service-robots in human daily life and also it is
necessary to update public regulation in safety field on the ground of actual
research results and of technological roadmaps that outline the future of
technology and of community life.
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5.3.5.
Scientific challenges of service-robotics
Human-Robot, Robot-Robot and Robot-environment cooperation.
The most
important part of service-robotics is the aspect of cooperation. The cooperation is a
complex task that in this field requires the interaction and the collaboration of different
actors: persons, robots and environment.
The cooperation between these figures is the major challenge of researches in
service robotics. This objective can be obtained working on:
analysis of users, robots and environment in order to highlight their
characteristics, their positive aspects, their limitation and to define
expectations and requirements;
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identification and modelling their cooperation looking particularly to the
impacts and consequences that all possible actions carried out by an actors
have on the other actors;
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development of appropriate communication strategies between the different
figures.
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Architecture and components.
Service-robots should not be systems that provide all
possible services for human but they should assist users only according to the specific
needs. For this reason they should be conceived as modular systems so that they can
have only components needed for specific tasks and user requirements (with also a
consequent energy optimization and conservation) but have also the possibility to
update the system according to the evolving of the contexts. Following this idea,
components should be “smart”, able to elaborate preliminarily signals and to transmit
processed information to basic architecture/server of the service-robots and to manage
energy consuming. Moreover, architecture should be designed for controlling and
coordinating distributed intelligence of components, for easily and quickly update plans
in case of change of context and conditions and, in case of addition of novel
components, for automatically updating the system structure in few time and without
interrupting the provided services.
On the base of these remarks, the new challenges for architecture and components
of service-robots are:
plug-and-play systems;
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comparability.
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