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 Graphic user interface Control panel
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 doesn’t 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.

14. Result (2)
--Demo pink ball

15. 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 it’s 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