PAL Robotics’ social robot ARI is taking part in the SHAPES project. Recent months have been an exciting time with pilots launched at the first home in Mallorca. The first pilot is taking place with Clinica Humana, SHAPES partner and a private clinic with more than 7-years of expertise in chronic patient management, and over 600 patients.

This pilot features our humanoid social robot ARI joining a user in their home to help with daily activities, with Juana, who is 82 years old and living alone, being the first person to test. Here robot ARI will support Juana with activities such as providing verbal reminders of tasks, giving news and updates, and being able to offer assistance including calling family members.

During this pilot, the robot is being programmed to carry out some of the following actions:

– Detect and monitor temperature

– Establish a video call

– Send alerts to caregivers by call, SMS or other means about incidents

– Receive messages from caregivers and external people

– Detect and monitor falls

– Remind users of different events

– Prompt follow-ups

– Entertainment games

Moreover, ARI will also be used at the sheltered apartments at C’an Granada, Mallorca, where the robot will work as a receptionist to give information about the facility, gather residents’ food menu preferences, and additional features named above.

A second SHAPES project pilot at the sheltered apartments at C’an Granada, Mallorca, and additional three pilot sites located in Ireland, Greece and Italy, will facilitate ARI to play cognitive games with older people, where the robot will explain and instruct end-users on the games to promote engagement. All together with a psychologist and with the goal of facilitating their work.

PAL Robotics’ ARI is a high-performance robotic platform designed for a wide range of multimodal expressive gestures and behaviour, focused on social interaction.

The robot consists of a mobile base, torso with an integrated Linux-based tablet, two arms and a head with expressive gaze. As a social robot ARI serves as a therapeutic assistant, to reduce loneliness, stress, and increase overall user enjoyment and activity.

The main consideration in prototype development here has been the design of a multimodal user interface. ARI robot offers multimodal behaviour by enabling interaction with the tablet, but also combining it with speech interaction, change of LED effects, expressive gestures with the arms and head, and animated eyes.

For some cases, the end-user will approach the robot to initiate the interaction, while for others, the robot will actively seek the user to indicate reminders. Modifications to the robot included the inclusion of a thermal camera, so that the robot may measure the older person’s temperature and alert the caregivers if the temperature is abnormal.

Digital solutions from several SHAPES partners are being integrated onto ARI to enable speech recognition, fall detection and video calls, and user authentication will be using multimodal biometrics. For that, ARI offers the Rest API so that digital solutions may call its functions externally, enabling the use of other programming languages (e.g. Java, Android). Moreover, digital solutions may be integrated onto the robot as ROS (Robotics Operating System) nodes.

To find out more about ARI, visit PAL Robotics website by clicking here!