Humanoid robots under development can be programmed to detect changes in an elderly person’s preferences and habits. Image credit: GrowMeUp

by Helen Massy-Beresford

Low birth rates and higher life expectancies mean that those over 65 years old now will account for 28.7 % of Europe’s population by 2080, according to Eurostat, the EU’s statistics arm.

It means the age-dependency ratio – the proportion of the elderly compared with the number of workers – will almost double from 28.8 % in 2015 to 51 % in 2080, straining healthcare systems and national budgets.

Yet there’s hope marching over the horizon, in the form of robots.

The creators of one humanoid robot under development for the elderly say it can understand people’s actions and learn new behaviours in response, even though it is devoid of arms.

Robots can be programmed to understand an elderly person’s preferences and habits to detect changes in behaviour: for example if a yoga devotee misses a class, it will ask why, while if an elderly person falls it will automatically alert caregivers or emergency services.

Yet there’s still a way to go before these devices will be able to bring out a tray of tea and biscuits when visitors drop by, according to its creator.

At the moment there are things the robot can perform perfectly in the lab but that still present challenges, says Dr Luís Santos from the University of Coimbra in Portugal, who has been developing the technology as part of an EU-funded research project known as GrowMeUp.

The proportion of elderly people is expected to almost double by 2080, so researchers are looking to robots to see if they can help care for the aging population. Image credit: GrowMeUp

‘There is a mismatch between what elderly people want and what science and technology can provide – some of them are expecting robots to do all types of household activities, engage them in everyday gossip or physically interact with them as another human would do,’ says Dr Santos.

The team is working on making the robot’s dialogue as natural and as intuitive as possible and improving its ability to safely navigate an older person’s home, using a low-cost laser and a camera, and a second prototype will be tested with elderly people in the coming months. Yet, Dr Santos foresees that these devices are still four to six years away from commercialisation, at least.

Revolution

He sees robotics as just a part of a wider revolution underway in how societies care for the elderly, with connectivity and augmented reality also playing a role.

‘In the future, elderly care will also be very focused on information and communications technologies – for example virtual access to doctors or care institutions and 24/7 monitoring in a non-invasive way are likely to become standard,’ he said.

Yet researchers believe that keeping the technology unobtrusive is key – no wearable devices or cumbersome cameras cluttering up people’s homes.

Dr Maria Dagioglou from the National Centre of Scientific Research ‘Demokritos’ in Greece, said: ‘We wanted to avoid a Big Brother scenario, so data privacy is important but also dignity.’

She is looking at ways to integrate robotics technology into a smart home equipped with connected devices, automation and sensors, as part of the EU-funded RADIO project.

Researchers are figuring out ways of putting robots in homes for virtual access to healthcare and constant monitoring, yet that are also non-invasive. Image credit: RADIO

Dr Stasinos Konstantopoulos, the scientific manager of the RADIO project, added: ‘All monitoring happens as the user interacts with the system to control the house, for example, to regulate the temperature, and to ask the robot to run errands, like finding misplaced items.’

Using a tablet or smartphone to interact, the equipment, which should only take a day to install, can monitor elements of an elderly person’s day-to-day life, efficiently processing and managing data to allow medical professionals to keep track of and assess their level of independence via smartphone notifications.

‘It’s a constant safety net in case something starts to be worrying,’ said Dr Dagioglou.

The goal of innovations like this is to allow people to live independently for longer.

A crucial element of this is finding ways for older people to keep up their activity levels, and this is an area where robots could really come into their own.

Dr Luigi Palopoli at the University of Trento in Italy said ‘our robot pushes them to do their exercise, to go out and about; it extracts information on their interests and on their fears and makes them part of a network.’

Barriers

‘We want to tear down the emotional barriers that make them stay at home and degrade the quality of their life,’ he said.

As part of the EU-funded Acanto project, he is developing a robot called FriWalk, following on from the progress made during a previous EU-funded project, the DALi project.

The team has worked hard to make the FriWalk robot look energetic and appealing and to ensure it offers useful services like carrying small items or giving directions.

With prototypes made, in the next few months, the researchers will start clinical trials in Spain as well as public demonstrations of the FriWalk in museums and other public spaces.

Researchers will start clinical trials in Spain of a robotic prototype designed to help elderly people to exercise. Image credit: Acanto

Further ahead, Dr Palopoli hopes for interest from established manufacturers and start-ups to bring the FriWalk technology to the market.

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If you take humans out of the driving seat, could traffic jams, accidents and high fuel bills become a thing of the past? As cars become more automated and connected, attention is turning to how to best choreograph the interaction between the tens or hundreds of automated vehicles that will one day share the same segment of Europe’s road network.

It is one of the most keenly studied fields in transport – how to make sure that automated cars get to their destinations safely and efficiently. But the prospect of having a multitude of vehicles taking decisions while interacting on Europe’s roads is leading researchers to design new traffic management systems suitable for an era of connected transport.

The idea is to ensure that traffic flows as smoothly and efficiently as possible, potentially avoiding the jams and delays caused by human behaviour.

‘Travelling distances and time gaps between vehicles are crucial,’ said Professor Markos Papageorgiou, head of the Dynamic Systems & Simulation Laboratory at the Technical University of Crete, Greece. ‘It is also important to consider things such as how vehicles decide which lane to drive in.’

Prof. Papageorgiou’s TRAMAN21 project, funded by the EU’s European Research Council, is studying ways to manage the behaviour of individual vehicles, as well as highway control systems.

For example, the researchers have been looking at how adaptive cruise control (ACC) could improve traffic flows. ACC is a ‘smart’ system that speeds up and slows down a car as necessary to keep up with the one in front. Highway control systems using ACC to adjust time gaps between cars could help to reduce congestion.

‘It may be possible to have a traffic control system that looks at the traffic situation and recommends or even orders ACC cars to adopt a shorter time gap from the car in front,’ Prof. Papageorgiou said.

‘So during a peak period, or if you are near a bottleneck, the system could work out a gap that helps you avoid the congestion and gives higher flow and higher capacity at the time and place where this is needed.’

Variable speed limits

TRAMAN21, which runs to 2018, has been running tests on a highway near Melbourne, Australia, and is currently using variable speed limits to actively intervene in traffic to improve flows.

An active traffic management system of this kind could even help when only relatively few vehicles on the highway have sophisticated automation. But he believes that self-driving vehicle systems must be robust enough to be able to communicate with each other even when there are no overall traffic control systems.

‘Schools of fish and flocks of birds do not have central controls, and the individuals base their movement on the information from their own senses and the behaviour of their neighbours,’ Prof. Papageorgiou said.

‘In theory this could also work in traffic flow, but there is a lot of work to be done if this is to be perfected. Nature has had a long head-start.’

One way of managing traffic flow is platooning – a way to schedule trucks to meet up and drive in convoy on the highway. Magnus Adolfson from Swedish truckmaker Scania AB, who coordinated the EU-funded COMPANION project, says that platooning – which has already been demonstrated on Europe’s roads – can also reduce fuel costs and accidents.

The three-year project tested different combinations of distances between trucks, speeds and unexpected disruptions or stoppages.

Fuel savings

In tests with three-vehicle platoons, researchers achieved fuel savings of 5 %. And by keeping radio contact with each other, the trucks can also reduce the risk of accidents.

‘About 90 percent of road accidents are caused by driver error, and this system, particularly by taking speed out of the driver’s control, can make it safer than driving with an actual driver,’ Adolfson said.

The COMPANION project also showed the benefits of close communication between vehicles to reduce the likelihood of braking too hard and causing traffic jams further back.

‘There is enough evidence to show that using such a system can have a noticeable impact, so it would be good to get it into production as soon as possible,’ Adolfson said. The researchers have extended their collaboration to working with the Swedish authorities on possible implementation.

Rutger Beekelaar, a project manager at Dutch-based research organisation TNO, says that researchers need to demonstrate how automated cars can work safely together in order to increase their popularity.

‘Collaboration is essential to ensure vehicles can work together,’ he said. ‘We believe that in the near future, there will be more and more automation in traffic, in cars and trucks. But automated driving is not widely accepted yet.’

To tackle this, Beekelaar led a group of researchers in the EU-funded i-GAME project, which developed technology that uses wireless communication that contributes to managing and controlling automated vehicles.

They demonstrated these systems in highway conditions in the 2016 Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge in Helmond, in the Netherlands, which put groups of real vehicles through their paces to demonstrate cooperation, how they safely negotiated an intersection crossing, and merged with another column of traffic.

Beekelaar says that their technology is now being used in other European research projects, but that researchers, auto manufacturers, policymakers, and road authorities still need to work together to develop protocols, systems and standardisation, along with extra efforts to address cyber security, ethics and particularly the issue of public acceptance.

By Ethan Bilby.

Field robots and plane-based remote sensors can patrol the earth and the sky to monitor the gases that cause climate change. Standing on three large wheels that help it avoid getting stuck in the soil, the Field Flux robot is able to lower two sampling chambers held on large arms to test soils for tiny amounts of nitrous oxide (N2O).
Though carbon dioxide (CO2) is better known when it comes to climate change, N2O has a global warming potential that’s over 300 times higher. In other words, a single molecule of N2O is as damaging as 300 CO2 molecules.

‘One of the great difficulties in quantifying N2O emissions from agriculture is that it changes with a factor of 100 from one day to the next and one spot to another,’ said Professor Lars Bakken, from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Oslo. He is a microbial ecologist on the NORA project, which is working out ways to reduce N2O emissions from soils and developed the monitoring robot alongside Norwegian company Adigo. ‘This is actually the whole reason we made the field robot. If you want to quantify emissions from a field experiment you have to measure over and over and over in many plots,’ said Prof. Bakken.

The Field Flux prototype can measure the amount of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide in agricultural fields. Image: NORA

Using the robot, a field that took 27 hours to test manually can be done in just one hour. Those measurements are crucial in controlling N2O as they could allow farmers to treat their soils where needed. The N2O is produced by some soil microorganisms during periods when the soil is not well aerated, for example during heavy rain, or when the soil is tightly packed. Those organisms, mostly bacteria, then use nitrogen oxides instead of oxygen for respiration. Several of those bacteria can respire N2O by using a very special enzyme, the N2O reductase. The researchers in the NORA project discovered that this enzyme is prevented from functioning correctly in acidic soils, and also when there isn’t enough copper present.

‘We looked at the biology of these organisms and how they regulate those processes that are responsible for N2O emissions,’ said Professor Åsa Frostegård, also a microbial ecologist at Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and the coordinator of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions-funded project. ‘We see large differences in how different microbes do these things.’

Image: ADIGO

Armed with that knowledge, it could be possible for farmers to reduce N2O pollution by changing the acidity or copper content in their soils. That could mean using so-called mafic rocks, minerals that are rich in iron and magnesium, to neutralise acid in the soil, instead of traditional liming, which can increase CO2.

Gazing at clouds

Monitoring particles once they get into the atmosphere, where they are known as aerosols, isn’t any easier. Researchers in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions-funded ITaRS project, led out of the University of Cologne in Germany, are using remote aircraft-based sensors and ground-based measurements to get a handle on when clouds are likely to form or develop precipitation.

‘One of the major uncertainties in atmospheric models is how clouds interact with aerosols in the atmosphere. We don’t even know in detail how clouds are formed,’ said Dr Maria Barrera Verdejo, an ITaRs fellow working with lidars and microwave radiometers. To form, clouds need particles such as dust or pollen for water to condense around. Improving the precision of ground- and air-based measurements provides researchers with new data they can use to better understand atmospheric phenomena, for example how and under which conditions storms will develop. ‘My measurements can be used for something that is called data assimilation in weather forecasting. You feed in what the atmospheric state is, and the model calculates what is going to happen next,’ Dr Barrera said.

With the measurements deployed within the ITaRS project, researchers were able to answer some scientific questions related to the understanding of atmospheric events. For example, information about what humidity, pressure conditions and particle concentration are required for a cloud to start drizzling, was obtained thanks to passive microwave sensors combined with radar measurements.

That data provided by ITaRS not only improves our knowledge on the atmospheric behaviour, but also helps to reduce uncertainties on climate models, which translates to a better understanding of climate change.

This article was originally published by Horizon Magazine.

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L’Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy. A government’s office disrupted by the 2009 earthquake. Source: Wikipedia Commons

by Fintan Burke

‘There’s no real way to determine how safe it is to approach a building, and what is the safest route to do that,’ said Dr Angelos Amditis of the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Greece. ‘Now for the first time you can do that in a much more structured way.’

Dr Amditis coordinates the EU-funded RECONASS project, which is using drones and satellite technology to help emergency workers in post-disaster scenarios.

It’s part of a new arsenal of airborne disaster response technologies which is giving a bird’s eye view of disaster zones to help save lives.

The system developed by RECONASS places wireless positioning tags into a building’s structure, along with strain, temperature and acceleration sensors, either when it is first built or through retrofitting. Then after a disaster strikes drones are deployed to scan the building’s exterior and match data from the sensors to this image to build an accurate representation of the damage.

This allows the system to precisely calculate potential areas of structural weakness in the damaged building, and it can then be paired with satellite data to get an overview of the damage in an area.

‘From one side we have 3D virtual images showing the status of the building … produced by ground sensors’ input, and from the other side we have the 3D real images from the drones and satellite views,’ said Dr Amditis.

‘There’s no real way to determine how safe it is to approach a building, and what is the safest route to do that.’

Dr Angelos Amditis, Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Greece

Dr Amditis and colleagues are hoping to test the system in September by detonating a mock three-storey building in Sweden to investigate how well the drone technology works.

The end goal is for emergency services to use the drone technology to provide information about the structural state of tagged buildings within the first crucial hours after the disaster.

To boost rescue services’ ability to respond quickly in the event of a crisis, researchers in Spain are working on how to help emergency helicopter pilots successfully navigate through a disaster area by giving them more precise and reliable information about their position.

The EU-funded 5 LIVES project is building a system that uses both the newly launched Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) from the European Commission and the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), which reports on the reliability and accuracy of data from satellites.

At the moment, most European helicopters use visual navigation, meaning they cannot fly in bad conditions such as fog, clouds or bad weather.

While more and more are beginning to use GNSS technology, the system has been known to be affected by slight changes in the earth’s atmosphere. There is also no way of knowing how accurate the information is.

‘With conventional GNSS technology positioning, there are a lot of external effects that might negatively affect the precision of positioning,’ said project manager Santi Vilardaga of Barcelona-based Pildo Labs.

In order to encourage the adoption of GNSS technology, the 5 LIVES system overlays information from EGNOS to confirm the precision and accuracy of satellite data.

‘Different parameters that affect the displacement of the signal or the propagation of the satellite signal through the atmosphere are collected through a network of ground-based stations and then transferred to the geostationary satellites that then broadcast the corrections to the EGNOS users,’ he said.

More flexible

This extra precision and confidence in the data allows emergency helicopters to become more flexible. ‘They can operate at night, they can operate technology in meteorological conditions without need of added technology on the ground,’ said Vilardaga.

They are also designing drone-based search and rescue operations. Drones can be used to fly around disaster areas, using on-board cameras to continue the search for survivors even when weather conditions make it unsafe for human pilots to do so, explains Vilardaga.

The team is now ensuring that the drones satisfy existing European regulation and their new positioning technology is up to standard for a demonstration of their search and rescue procedures next year.

The need for a new way to combat natural disasters from the air is being driven in part by a new type of crisis – so-called mega-fires. These once-rare fires, which are known to spread at a rate of more than three acres per second, are forest fires large enough to spread between fire-fighting jurisdictions.

A variety of factors such as drought, climate change and the practice of preventing smaller fires to develop naturally have all been blamed for the increasing frequency of mega-fires.

To defend against these fires, the EU-funded Advanced Forest Fire Fighting project is trying to improve both firefighting logistics and technology.

One method involves developing a pellet made of extinguishing materials which can be dropped from a greater height, meaning pilots are less likely to encounter risks from smoke or heat from the fire.

Another area under development is centralising the information from satellite data, drones and ground reports into what is being called a core expert engine to help firefighters to prioritise procedures.

‘The commander can have at his disposal just one aircraft with a pellet,’ said project coordinator Cecilia Coveri of Finmeccanica SpA, Italy, ‘and in case the pellet is the best way to extinguish a fire … this simulation can help the commander to take this decision.’

The project begins its first trials in Athens during the summer in cooperation with Greek naval forces, with additional testing of the risk analysis and simulation tools to follow.

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Researchers are studying bees to make robotic versions that can help beekeepers look after their hives. Image courtesy of ASSISIbf

by Steve Gillman

It’s part of a series of projects where researchers are building robots that mimic evolutionary traits of animals in order to interact with the world in a more efficient way.

‘What we had in a mind was a set of machines that were capable of interacting with bees,’ said Dr Thomas Schmickl of the Artificial Life Laboratory in Graz, Austria. He coordinates ASSISIbf, an EU-funded project to design robots that integrate with animal societies for environmental and agricultural monitoring.

‘We want our robots to be accepted by bees so they are treated like real members of the society.’

The project has a bio-hybrid hive where static robot bees exist side-by-side with their living counterparts, so far for periods of around two to three hours. The idea is to paint a picture of what is going on inside the hive and then use the robots to influence the bees’ behaviour.

‘You soon notice that a dialogue emerges,’ said Dr Schmickl.

The robots can artificially recreate several stimuli such as airflow from fanning wings and temperature, which can be both appealing and repelling for the living bees. They can also vibrate and mimic the queen bee, which speeds or stops the living organisms.

Sensors on the living bees also feed into an ‘evolutionary algorithm’ which learns how to map their behaviour and allows the robotic bees to better interact with the insects.

‘With just a few (robot) bees we can detect abnormalities, something that was different the days before,’ said Dr Schmickl. ‘You can retrieve information about the whole situation of the population: is it dense, is it moving or not? Then you have an environmental sensing capability.’

This can help beekeepers look after their hives better, in particular, reducing the need to open them for inspection which can cause stress to all the bees and even kill hundreds of them each time.

‘We want our robots to be accepted by bees so they are treated like real members of the society.’

Dr Thomas Schmickl, Artificial Life Laboratory in Graz, Austria

‘In the beginning it’s just a beehive, but in the long run, the more sophisticated this gets, you could be talking to the whole population of a forest,’ said Dr Schmickl. ‘We want to get control over the animal community by establishing a fair dialogue between the animals and the machines.’

Agriculture is not the only industry that could benefit from bio-inspired robots: ocean energy could also use the evolutionary traits of squid and octopus.

‘Ocean renewable energy technologies, such as offshore wind farms or wave energy harvesting devices, are designed to produce energy from stretches of sea where winds are stronger and waves are higher, but while extreme weather conditions increase the productivity it also increases the costs of maintenance of these structures,’ said Dr Francesco Giorgio-Serchi from the University of Southampton, UK.

Currently, maintaining these huge structures requires taking them out of the ocean, but a lot of time and money would be saved if you could access them underwater.

‘Squids and octopus are able to swim in a very efficient way,’ said Dr Giorgio-Serchi. ‘They can perform very impressive manoeuvres without having joints … so we tried to do the same thing.’

Dr Giorgio-Serchi ran the EU-funded CFD-Octoprop project, which designed an octopus-inspired robot with a rubber cavity instead of organic tissue and cables instead of muscles, which were pulled with a small electric motor.

‘By shortening the cables, the shell would shrink and expel the fluid inside, then simply because of the elastic nature of the rubber material, the shell would re-inflate, suck water in and the cycle would start again,’ he said.

This recreated an octopus’ propulsion which gives it a manoeuvrability that could see it act as a future deep sea repair robot, and that’s not all.

‘They could be used for disaster response and to check the wellbeing of the flooded parts of nuclear power plants,’ said Dr Giorgio-Serchi.

‘The shape-changing effect, which plays such a big part in the generation of thrust of these vehicles, could also have an impact on the design of new energy-generating devices for underwater energy harvesters.’

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Dr Serchi and his team made a robot prototype that looks like an octopus with the hope that a final version can act as a deep sea repairman. Image credit: Age of Robots, M. Brega

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The researchers are inspired by the octopus because this creature can easily move and manoeuvre in the water without any joints. Image credit: Age of Robots, M. Brega

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The researchers put cables and a small motor inside a flexible rubber shell, which can easily fill up and expel water. Image credit: Age of Robots, M. Brega

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The robot pulses through the water leaving a wake behind. Image credit: CFD OctoProp

Unforeseen applications

Mimicking the movement of an animal can open the door to a range of new technologies with previously unforeseen applications, say researchers.

‘(Bio-inspired) robots could help us build artificial limbs, exoskeletons or robotic companions,’ said Dr Helmut Hauser from the University of Bristol, UK and previously of the University of Zurich in Switzerland. While in Zurich, Dr Hauser was project manager of Locomorph, an EU-funded project which developed animal-inspired movement in robots.

‘A lot of the control and processes are not happening in the brain, but in the body itself. The body is carrying out computational processes.’

Locomorph constructed over 20 bio-inspired robots aiming to increase self-stabilisation, energy efficiency and manoeuvrability in unknown environments.

‘We looked at ecological methodologies that were caused by natural selection and built different terrains in the lab, like slopes and stairs,’ said Dr Hauser. ‘Also a very important concept of the project was the idea of morphosis, i.e. changing the body to adapt to new tasks and different environment.’

For example, Locomorph looked at dogs, toddlers and apes as well as different types of salamanders, some that lived in the grass and others that lived in water.

‘They have very basic principles that can be found in humans, but we are much more complex. If we understand salamanders we can build upon those principles,’ said Dr Hauser.

The idea is to build robots whose movements are suited to different types of situations, such as search and rescue operations or working on a factory floor.

Researchers are creating robots that can move in a variety of environments, just like the animals that inspire them. Images courtesy of Locomorph

Locomorph developed a whole range of new control mechanics and robotic systems that implemented these underlying principles. Their results are available in a robot construction kit, called LocoKit, which allows other roboticists and researchers to build robots with legs and locomotive ability.

‘As these systems become more intelligent, sooner or later, I think we will have robotic companions working with us at home,’ said Dr Hauser.

See also

• Octopus points to the future for keyhole surgery
• Inspired by nature – made by science
• Nature inspires new generation of robot brains
• Fish and ships: artificial lily pads and mussels monitor Europe’s waters