AssIstent DE tasques Domestiques (AIDED)

Abstract

Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs) are those activities relatedto allowing an individual to live independently in a community, and involve taskslike cooking, cleaning, transporting, doing laundry, and managing finances. InUnited States a 31.7% of the citizens have limitations in IADLs, affecting moreto elders.For this reason, in this project, we present our first steps towards a col-laborative robot that supports Instrumental Activities of Daily Living. Moreprecisely, we propose a collaborative table-setting scenario where a human anda robot work together to coordinate their actions to fulfil the task while con-sidering their “abilities”. Thus, given a set of objects on the table and after auser command, the robot sets the table in a different configurations, e.g.tablefor one, ortable for two, either on its own, or requesting support to the user atspecific points.To this end, a system development and integration has been carried out. Themain modules are: aTask Planner, in charge of planing the sequence of actionsto achieve the task goal; aMotion Planner, to plan the object manipulationtrajectories without colliding with the environment; aVerbal Communication,to interact with the user through voice; and aVisionmodule, to detect andlocalize objects in the environment.Besides successfully fulfilling the task at hand in “ideal” scenarios, the sys-tem also adapts to unexpected situations such as having more objects thanneeded, missing objects, unfeasible robot movements, as well as handling visionor manipulation inaccuracies.The system has been mainly tested in simulation due to the COVID-19 confinement, which has proved an additional challenge to the project