The RoboCare project, cognitive systems for the care of the elderly

Abstract

The RoboCare project focuses on the development of distributed systems in which software and robotic agents contribute to the common goal of generating active services in environments in which humans may need assistance and guidance, such as health care facilities. Thanks to recent technological advances, there are now many potential applications for robotics including multi-agent systems. The aim of the RoboCare Project 1 is to study issues and challenges involved in the design of systems for the care of the elderly that adopt both fixed and mobile heterogeneous agents. These agents can be robots, intelligent sensors or possibly even humans. RoboCare shares some aspects with other projects for the assistance of elderly people, such as Pearle, the mobile robotic assistant for the elderly Figure 1. Overall system structure: operator level system control and distributed environment. [9] and the Assisted Cognition Project [3], but addresses the particular goal of creating a heterogeneous multi-agent environment for generating user services.