The Perception and Manipulation Group investigates in service robotics and has two TIAGo mobile manipulation robots and a laboratory simulating an assistive apartment. This project wants to investigate the benefits of adding an intelligent agent based on an active vision system for searching, detecting and localizing objects in the environment in an efficient way. The aim is that both humans and robots can make queries to the agent about the presence of certain objects within the scene, and also their specific location. The project will study the current state of the art in computer vision that can solve this type of problem, evaluate the different techniques and implement the best solution Mobility impairment is a disability that affects movement. Said impairment can be caused by many diseases, but in most cases aging is the most significant factor. People who suffer such disabilities have to limit the actions they can do as the disability increases. In cases where the disability is so great that the disabled person cannot live on its own, an external agent is required. This agent has to be capable of doing anything the disabled person is unable to do, which can be actions as basic and necessary as feeding oneself, or moving around looking for an object. Usually these people are brought into nursing homes, so there can always be somebody ready to assist the disabled person. In other cases, the assistant is brought into the disabled person’s house. Although it is a common occurrence that disabled people prefer to be looked after by a human, there are situations where the caregiver is unable to assist the disabled person or in cases where his presence represents a threat to the patient’s health (e. g. due to disease transmission). In such situations, having a robotic system taking care of the patient helps both parties. Taking into account that there are countless actions a robotic system can take to assist the disabled person, the European Healthcare Robotics Technologies - Metrified (HEART-MET) competition addresses tasks that may directly impact the user’s well-being. Some of the function alities evaluated in this competition are the ones we will be implementing in this project, so we will take into account their evaluation system when developing it.
