Due to the world’s rapidly growing elderly population, dementia is becoming increasingly prevalent. This poses considerable health, social, and economic concerns as it impacts individuals, families and healthcare systems. Current research has shown that cognitive interventions may slow the decline of or improve brain functioning in older adults. This research investigates the use of intelligent socially assistive robots to engage individuals in person-centered cognitively stimulating activities. Specifically, in this thesis, a novel learning-based control architecture is developed to enable socially assistive robots to act as social motivators during an activity. A hierarchical reinforcement learning approach is used in the architecture so that the robot can learn appropriate assistive behaviours based on activity structure and personalize an interaction based on the individual’s behaviour and user state. Experiments show that the control architecture is effective in determining the robot’s optimal assistive behaviours for a memory game interaction and a meal assistance scenario.

Postpartum Depression (PPD) affects 8-15 percent of new mothers in Sweden every year. The majority of PPD cases go undetected, and only a few percent receive adequate care. New ways to detect and diagnose PPD are required. In my previous work, PPD experts expressed willingness to integrate social assistive robots (SARs) into their medical team. Moreover, we disclosed that future work was needed to include patients' perspectives on the subject. This thesis aims to provide insights from mothers with experience of mental health issues in relation to their pregnancy to elicit perceptions, attitudes and opinions towards SARs in PPD healthcare. Semi-structured interviews with participants (n=10) and a generative design activity were conducted and analyzed using thematic analysis. The results suggest split opinions towards SARs in PPD healthcare. Participants expressed healthcare needs, and how SARs could be used to address these issues. Opinions towards the robot's appearance, including characteristics, gender and ethnicity were also discussed. Future work including midwives, child health nurses' and perspectives is needed, as well as a larger sample of women to validate the robot’s appearance, gender and characteristics.

When using socially assistive robots (SAR), it is important that their personality is personalised so that it suits their user. This work investigated how the customisation of the personality of a SAR health coach is perceived when done by the users themselves or their friends via ChatGPT. Therefore, the research question in this study is: How is personalised dialogue for a social robot perceived when generated via ChatGPT, by users and their friends? This study uses a mixed method approach, where participants got to test their own and their friend’s personalised version. The qualitative data was analysed using a thematic analysis. Sixteen participants were recruited.The result from this study showed that it does not matter who is customising the SAR, nor does one make a more persuasive version than the other, and when customising the personality, participants explained what they or their friend preferred. However, it is important to remember that the individual’s preference matters.

The research addresses current shortcomings of autonomous service robots operating in domestic environments by considering the concept of a semi-autonomous robot that would be supported by human remote operators whenever the robot cannot handle a task autonomously. The main research objective was to investigate how to design the human-robot interaction for a robotic system to assist elderly people with physical tasks at home according to this conceptual idea. The research procedure followed the principles of human-centered design and is structured into four phases: In the first phase, the context of use of the system to be designed was determined. A focus group study yielded characteristics and attitudes of several potential user groups. A survey determined the demands of elderly people and informal caregivers for services a semiautonomous assistive robot may provide. An ethnographic study investigated the living conditions of elderly people and determined technical challenges for robots operating in this type of environment. Another ethnographic study investigated the work environment in teleassistive service centers and determined the feasibility of extending their range of services to incorporate robotic teleassistance. In the second phase, two studies were carried out to understand the interaction requirements. The first study determined common types of failure of current autonomous robots and required human interventions to resolve such failure states. The second study investigated how the human assistance could be provided considering a range of potential interaction devices. In the third phase, a human-robot interaction concept with three user groups and dedicated user interfaces was designed. The concept and user interfaces were refined in an iterative process based on the results of evaluations with prospective users and received encouraging results for user satisfaction and user experience. In the fourth and final phase the utility of two specific user interface features was investigated experimentally. The first experiment investigated the utility of providing remote operators with global 3D environment maps during robot navigation and identified beneficial usage scenarios. The second experiment investigated the utility of stereoscopic display for remote manipulation and robot navigation. Results suggested temporal advantages under stereoscopic display for one of three investigated task types and potential advantages for the other two. / Forskningen behandlar problem med autonoma robotar som agerar i hemmiljö. Specifikt studeras konceptet semi-autonoma robotar, vilket innebär att robotarna stöds av mänskliga operatörer när de inte klarar uppgifter på egen hand. Syftet med forskningen är att undersöka design av människa-robotinteraktion för robotsystem som stöder äldres behov av hjälp med fysiska uppgifter i hemmiljö. Forskningen är användarcentrerad och har strukturerats i fyra faser: I den första fasen undersöktes användarkontexten för systemet. I en fokusgruppsstudie utforskades karakteristika och attityder för flera potentiella användargrupper. Kraven på en semi-autonom robot för att assistera äldre och informella vårdgivare fastställdes. En enkätstudie undersökte levnadsvillkor hos äldre för att utforska tekniska utmaningar dessa omgivningar ställer på robotar. En etnografisk studie undersökte arbetskontexten på servicecenter för teleassistans och undersökte genomförbarhet i att utöka tjänsteutbudet till att även inkludera teleassisterade robotar. I den andra fasen utfördes två studier för att få kunskap om interaktionskrav. Den första studien fastställde vanliga typer av fel som inträffar med nuvarande typer av autonoma robotar och de typer av mänsklig assistans som krävs för att hantera dessa fel. Den andra studien undersökte hur mänsklig assistans kan utformas givet en repertoar av potentiella interaktionsanordningar. I den tredje fasen utformades ett interaktionskoncept för människa-robot interaktionen för tre användargrupper med dedicerade gränssnitt. Koncepten och användargränssnitten förfinades i en iterativ process baserat på resultat från utvärderingar med tänkta användare, och resulterade i uppmuntrande resultat vad gäller användarnas uppskattning och tillfredsställelse. I den fjärde och sista fasen studerades nyttan hos två specifika gränssnitt experimentellt. Det första experimentet undersökte nyttan med att ge operatörer på distans globala 3D-kartor under robotnavigeringen och identifierade användarscenarier där detta kan utnyttjas. Det andra experimentet undersökte nyttan med en stereoskopisk display för att manipulera och navigera roboten på distans. Resultaten visar på temporala fördelar med stereoskopisk display för en av tre undersökta uppgiftstyper och potentiella fördelar för de andra två.

In this master thesis are presented design and testing processes of communication between elderly and single-purpose robot. At the beginning design and architecture of the system for testing are described. Communication understandability was checked in interviews with nineteen people. Other opinions on usability or affordability of automatic device, which is used for picking and lifting objects from the ground, are presented in this thesis. Results from questionnaires and measurements showed that working with the robot is pleasant and understandable. Even senior is able to learn effective communication with this device. The main finding is that even robot communicates through nonverbal sounds, is easy to understand it. Choosing of sound set has no influence on communication understandability.

<p dir="ltr">This paper aims to gain a deep understanding of up-to-date research and development on modular self-reconfigurable robots (MSRs) through a thorough survey of market demands and published works on <i>design methodologies</i>, <i>system integration</i>, <i>advanced controls</i>, and <i>new applications</i>. Some limitations of existing mobile MSR are discussed from the reconfigurability perspective of mechanical structures, and a novel MSR system is proposed to address the identified limitations of existing MSRs. The comprehensive set of <i>Functional Requirements</i> (FRs) of MSRs is discussed, from which the mechanical designs of MSR were created, and the system was prototyped and built for testing. Three main innovations of the designed modules for MSR are to (1) share torque power, (2) customize the size for a given task, and (3) have a low number of actuated motors while still maintain a motion with high <i>Degrees of Freedom</i> (DoF) to overcome the constraints by the power capacities of individual motors; this helps to increase reconfigurability, reduce cost, and reduce the size of conventional MSRs.</p>

<p dir="ltr">Over 150,000 people undergo lower-extremity amputations yearly in the United States. In recent years, multiple efforts have been made to improve the human-robot interaction between amputees and active lower limb prostheses. Using lightweight wearable technologies has been a viable solution to implement algorithms that can estimate gait kinematics and prosthesis users’ intent. Examples of wearable technologies include inertial measurement units, strain gauges, and electromyography sensors. Kinematic and force data is inputted into an Error-State Kalman filter to estimate the inversion-eversion, external-internal, and dorsiflexion-plantarflexion ankle angle. The filter tracked the ankle angle with an accuracy of 0.7724°, 0.8826°, and 1.3520°, respectively. The gait phase was estimated using a linear regression model based on a shank kinematics ground truth pattern with an average normalized accuracy of 97.79 %. A numerical simulation of a gait emulator in the form of a 3-Revolute-Prismatic-Revolute (3-RPR) manipulator. The gait emulator can test lower limb prostheses independent of human subjects, eliminating many hurdles associated with human subject testing. The manipulator was simulated with two control strategies: a traditional PID and a hybrid PID + Active Force Control controller (AFC). The hybrid PID+AFC provided higher accuracy in tracking the desired end-effector trajectory due to improved disturbance rejection. A low-cost surface electromyography (sEMG) platform was developed to robustly acquire sEMG signals, with an overall component cost of 35.06 US$. The sEMG platform integrates directly into a Micro:bit microcontroller through an expansion board. During testing with human subjects, sEMG Micro:bit platform had a reported average signal-to-noise ratio of 24.7 dB.</p>