A Layered Architecture for Socially Assistive Robotics as a Service

Abstract

Socially assistive robotics technology is expected to play a crucial role in supporting home patients with neurological disorders. Nevertheless, the adoption of such technology in real home environments is still far to be reached since it presents several challenges mainly related to its acceptance in the everyday life. In this domain, a high degree of personalization is required usually obtained by a customization of a robotic system with respect to specific assistive tasks. On the contrary, socially assistive robots are usually general-purpose platforms requiring a considerable effort for customization. In this work, to limit static and costly customization of robotic systems, a service-oriented approach is adopted to represent and manage assistive tasks to be performed by a social robotic system, allowing to decouple a given functionality from its concrete implementation that can be provided by different devices and with different execution modalities. The service-oriented approach for robotics applications, known as Robot-as-a-Service, is becoming attractive for decoupling the robot hardware from the functionalities it provides.