Project C-Kompai

Second ECHORD public summary. Month of Setember

In these two months of development of the project (August and September), the physical Kompai platform has been adapted to hold the cognitive brain, C-BRAIN, with the exception of an extra sensor that is going to be added, the kinect sensor. The kinect has been tested during this time in our labs with such excellent results that we have decided to include it in the final robotic Kompai platform for the project, even if it was not planned or included in our proposal. We expect that the physical Kompai platform will be completely ready to hold the cognitive brain and delivered during the month of November.

Beside the development and testing of the kinect sensor integrated with the rest of the cognitive brain, several other software components of the cognitive brain have been developed, in particular, those related with object and scene recognition and comparison, spatial decision maker; and global path planner.

The main purpose of the C-Kompai project is to integrate the KOMPAÏ robotic companion platform (Figure 1 a) with the Cognitive Brain for Service Robotics, CBRAIN system (Figure 1 b).

One of the KOMPAÏ main application purposes is the assistance to elderly people, providing several functionalities such as reminders, Internet access and general day to day support for humans. The robot has several devices and functionalities (navigation, obstacle detection but also advanced dialog, reminder –agenda, todo list-, email and videoconference software) allowing the robot to interact with the person and offer the different services. The KOMPAÏ robot navigation solution is an autonomous navigation solution based on traditional techniques and does not incorporate cognitive capabilities. Currently, the KOMPAÏ platform has certain basic limitations such as, (1) the installation of the KOMPAÏ robot in the home of the elder person (the technician needs to insert the map of the house with all the furniture) and (2) the robot is unable to adapt to changes in the environment and unexpected situations.

With the incorporation of the Cognitive Brain for Service Robotics, CBRAIN, in this project, we will be able to add new cognitive capabilities to the KOMPAÏ platform, which will overcome its limitations. The expected result of the experiment is the incorporation to the KOMPAÏ robot of the following functionalities and capabilities:

• High level perception and representation of the environment, to recognize the most significant landmarks of the environment (walls, doors, corners, shelves...etc) and including naming of environment parts (kitchen, bathroom...etc) and spatial relation between environment components

• Robust and reliable autonomous discovering of the environment and map building functionality, in which the most significant landmarks in any new environment are considered by the robot without help of operator.

• Cognitive navigation based on the previous two capabilities.

• Intelligent problem solving based on reasoning processes allowing the robot to take high level decisions such as: deciding what part of the surface is already clean, what part is not cleaned yet, interpretation of users’ behavior in order to adapt its own behavior (handle unpredictable interaction with users)...

Figure 1a. KOMPAÏ robot.	Figure 1b. CBRAIN in a scrubber machine.