Aibo companion

1
Aibo companion

• DOAS group 1
• Aitor Azcarate Onaindia
• Abeer Mahdi
• Zhiwei Zhan
• Ning Yang
• Supervisor Frans Groen

2
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)

3
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

4
System Architecture
5
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

6
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.

7
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)

8
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 doesnt
  support Aibo ERS-7 very well.

9
Results

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

10
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

11
Results

• Aibo can detect faces correctly.
• However, in this stage it can only detect the
  front side of the face.
• --Demo

12
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

13
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.

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Result (2)

• --Demo pink ball

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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 its 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

16
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