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Current intralogistics services require keeping up with e-commerce demands, reducing delivery times and waste, and increasing overall flexibility. As a consequence, the use of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and, more recently, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for logistics operations is steadily increasing.

Automated exploration is one of the most relevant applications of autonomous robots. In this paper, we suggest a novel online coverage algorithm called Next-Best-Sense (NBS), an extension of the Next-Best-View class of exploration algorithms that optimizes the exploration task balancing multiple criteria. This novel algorithm is applied to the problem of localizing all Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags with a mobile robotic platform that is equipped with a RFID reader. We cast this problem as a coverage planning problem by defining a basic sensing operation -- a scan with the RFID reader -- as the field of “view” of the sensor. NBS evaluates candidate locations with a global utility function which combines utility values for travel distance, information gain, sensing time, battery status and RFID information gain, generalizing the use of Multi-Criteria Decision Making. We developed an RFID reader and tag model in the Gazebo simulator for validation. Experiments performed both in simulation and with a real robot suggest that our NBS approach can successfully localize all the RFID tags while minimizing navigation metrics such sensing operations, total traveling distance and battery consumption. The code developed is publicly available on the authors' repository.

Recent technological advances enabled modern robots to become part of our daily life. In particular, assistive robotics emerged as an exciting research topic that can provide solutions to improve the quality of life of elderly and vulnerable people. This paper introduces the robotic platform developed in the ENRICHME project, with particular focus on its innovative perception and interaction capabilities. The project’s main goal is to enrich the day-to-day experience of elderly people at home with technologies that enable health monitoring, complementary care, and social support. The paper presents several modules created to provide cognitive stimulation services for elderly users with mild cognitive impairments. The ENRICHME robot was tested in three pilot sites around Europe (Poland, Greece, and UK) and proven to be an effective assistant for the elderly at home.

This work addresses the performance of several local planners for navigation of autonomous pallet trucks in the presence of humans in a simulated warehouse as well as a complementary approach developed within the ILIAD project. Our focus is to stress the open problem of a safe manoeuvrability of pallet trucks in the presence of moving humans. We propose a variation of ROS navigation stack that includes in the planning process a model of the human robot interaction.

The automatic detection of anomalies in Active and Assisted Living (AAL) environments is important for monitoring the wellbeing and safety of the elderly at home. The integration of smart domotic sensors (e.g. presence detectors) with those ones equipping modern mobile robots (e.g. RGBD camera) provides new opportunities for addressing this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to combine local activity levels detected by a single RGBD camera with the global activity perceived by a network of domotic sensors. Our approach relies on a new method for computing such a global activity using various presence detectors, based on the concept of entropy from information theory. This entropy effectively shows how active a particular room or environment’s area is. The solution includes also a new application of Hybrid Markov Logic Networks (HMLNs) to merge different information sources for local and global anomaly detection. The system has been tested with RGBD data and a comprehensive domotic dataset containing data entries from 37 different domotic sensors (presence, temperature, light, energy consumption, door contact), which is made publicly available. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach and the potential for complex anomaly detection in AAL settings.

The problem of active human detection with a mobile robot equipped with an RGB-D camera is considered in this work. Traditional human detection algorithms for indoor mobile robots face several challenges, including occlusions due to cluttered dynamic environments, changing backgrounds, and large variety of human movements. Active human detection aims to improve classic detection systems by actively selecting new and potentially better observation points of the person. In this preliminary work, we present a system that actively guides a mobile robot towards high-confidence human detections, including initial simulation tests that highlight pros and cons of the proposed approach.