Amedeo Cesta

Italian National Research Council | CNR · Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies ISTC

Analysing visitors’ behaviour in a museum or in a cultural site is a crucial element to manage spaces and artworks arrangement as well as improving the visit experience. This paper presents the preliminary results of the ARTEMISIA project, exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to study, design and develop a methodology to interpret vis...

As life expectancy increases, social and health assistance requires sustainable and affordable solutions possibly usable from one's own domestic environment. In this article, we propose a transformer-based approach combined with a task-planning system and enhanced with AI sub-modules to run on low-cost telepresence robots in order to support more...

This work investigate temporal planning to synthesize personalized physical rehabilitation programs. The first contribution of the work concerns the representation of (heterogeneous) clinical and spatial constraints into a planning framework. The second contribution is the integration of numerical and symbolic reasoning to synthesize technically va...

The diffusion of Human-Robot Collaborative cells is prevented by several barriers. Classical control approaches seem not yet fully suitable for facing the variability conveyed by the presence of human operators beside robots. The capabilities of representing heterogeneous knowledge representation and performing abstract reasoning are crucial to enh...

Combining symbolic and geometric reasoning in multiagent systems is a challenging task that involves planning, scheduling, and synchronization problems. Existing works overlooked the variability of task duration and geometric feasibility intrinsic to these systems because of the interaction between agents and the environment. We propose a combined...

Combining symbolic and geometric reasoning in multi-agent systems is a challenging task that involves planning, scheduling, and synchronization problems. Existing works overlooked the variability of task duration and geometric feasibility that is intrinsic to these systems because of the interaction between agents and the environment. We propose a...

The growing deployment of social robots requires the ability to adapt to the dynamic changes occurring in the real environments. These reactive behaviors, however, are often incapable of reasoning and predicting the effects of their actions in the next future. Therefore, they must be accompanied by forms of deliberative semantic/causal reasoning. T...

Telepresence robots can support people with special needs (e.g., who cannot move) to remotely interact with people and the environment at a distance. In this application, people can communicate with the robot via alternative channels of communication, such as brain-machine interfaces, that are less accurate than the traditional mediums and allow th...

In this paper, SI-ROBOTICS, a rehabilitation programme for people with Parkinson's disease, is presented along with preliminary results. The SI-ROBOTICS system, consisting of a robotic platform, a game, wearable and environmental sensors, and an artificial intelligence algorithm, aims to sup-port the treatment of Parkinson's patients following a re...

Socially assistive robotics (SAR) aims at designing robots capable of guaranteeing social interaction to human users in a variety of assistance scenarios that range, e.g., from giving reminders for medications to monitoring of Activity of Daily Living, from giving advices to promote an healthy lifestyle to psychological monitoring. Among possible u...

Autonomous robots can face a variety of applications integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, for instance Planning & Scheduling (P&S). While robotics and planning systems are commonly well assessed through test benchs and metrics, in autonomous robots literature it is usual to present isolated case studies for evaluating such works. Fo...

The Urban Intelligence (UI) paradigm conceived by CNR consists of an ecosystem of digital technologies joined within a Digital Twin (DT) of the city aimed at improving the city governance towards goals addressed also by the UN Agenda 2030, such as urban environment, sustainability and resilience, wellbeing and quality of life, local development, an...

One of the main challenges of social robots concerns the ability to guarantee robust, contextualized and intelligent behavior capable of supporting continuous and personalized interaction with different users over time. This implies that robot behaviors should consider the specificity of a person (e.g., personality, preferences, assistive needs), t...

Industry 4.0 is pushing forward the need for symbiotic interactions between physical and virtual entities of production environments to realize increasingly flexible and customizable production processes. This holds especially for human–robot collaboration in manufacturing, which needs continuous interaction between humans and robots. The coexisten...

By 2030, the World Health Organization (WHO) foresees a worldwide workforce shortfall of healthcare professionals, with dramatic consequences for patients, economies, and communities. Research in assistive robotics has experienced an increasing attention during the last decade demonstrating its utility in the realization of intelligent robotic solu...

Human-machine speech and interaction is becoming increasingly important. In particular, one of the aspects that is gaining attention concerns the possibility to interact in a natural way and, more specifically, in natural language. Being able to support a believable speech-based conversation is particularly relevant especially for tools that assist...

In the last years, social robots have become a trending topic. Indeed, robots which communicate with us and mimic human behavior patterns are fascinating. However, while there is a massive body of research on their design and acceptance in different fields of application, their market potential has been rarely investigated. As their future integrat...

Mobile Telepresence Robots represent a class of robotic platforms, characterized by a video conferencing system mounted on a mobile robotic base, which allows a pilot user to move around in the robot’s environment. These commercially available platforms are relatively cheap and straightforward, yet robust enough to operate continuously in a dynamic...

Introduction: Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the most frequent causes of disability among older people, characterized by motor disorders, rigidity, and balance problems. Recently, dance has started to be considered an effective exercise for people with PD. In particular, Irish dancing, along with tango and different forms of modern dance, may b...

Soziale Roboter, die mit uns kommunizieren und menschliche Verhaltensmuster imitieren, sind ein wichtiges Zukunftsthema. Während viele Arbeiten ihr Design und ihre Akzeptanz erforschen, gibt es bislang nur wenige Untersuchungen zu ihrer Marktfähigkeit. Der Schwerpunkt dieser Arbeit liegt auf dem Einsatz sozialer Roboter in den Bereichen Gesundheit...

This article is a retrospective overview of work performed in the domain of Active Assisted Living over a span of almost 18 years. The authors have been creating and refining artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics solutions to support older adults in maintaining their independence and improving their quality of life. The goal of this article is...

Among more dramatic effects, the COVID-19 scenario also raised the need for new online information and communication services, promoting the spread of software solutions whose usefulness will last well beyond the pandemic situation. Particularly in the cultural heritage domain, it has been unveiled the relevance of new AI-based approaches, able to...

Technology supported assistance is a research area dedicated to support both older adults and, at some level, their caregivers in a variety of situations and contexts. A number of projects doing detailed evaluation both with robots and/or ICT-based intelligent devices have identified as open challenges the need to guarantee both continuity and vari...

This article describes the work done to create an innovative system to support people with Mild Cognitive Impairment or Mild Dementia. The basic idea of the system is to exploit an extremely simple and familiar technology for older people, namely television (TV). In fact, the TV-AssistDem system exploits the smart-TV technology to provide a series...

BACKGROUND Considering the changing demographic trends in Europe, the rising prevalence of dementia, and the increasing demand, limited accessibility and finite resources for long-term healthcare and support services, developing active and assisted living technological solutions becomes necessary for the independent living of community-dwelling adu...

MAESTRO (Sustainable Reference Framework evaluating equipment and services for seniors) is a web-based ICT multi modal platform providing a broad range of services and benefits in the domain of monitoring and self-monitoring systems for well-being and health-related information acquisition. Specifically, MAESTRO aims at realizing an innovative fram...

A key aspect of robotic assistants is their ability to contex-tualize their behavior according to different needs of assis-tive scenarios. This work presents an ontology-based knowledge representation and reasoning approach supporting the synthesis of personalized behavior of robotic assistants. It introduces an ontological model of health state an...

Socially assistive robots should provide users with personalized assistance within a wide range of scenarios such as hospitals, home or social settings and private houses. Different people may have different needs both at the cognitive/physical support level and in relation to the preferences of interaction. Consequently the typology of tasks and t...

Combining task and motion planning efficiently in human-robot collaboration (HRC) entails several challenges because of the uncertainty conveyed by the human behavior. Tasks plan execution should be continuously monitored and updated based on the actual behavior of the human and the robot to maintain productivity and safety. We propose control-base...

Socially assistive robotics aims at providing users with continuous support and personalized assistance, through appropriate social interactions. The design of robots capable of supporting people in heterogeneous tasks, raises several challenges among which the most relevant are the need to realise intelligent and continuous behaviours, robustness...

The diffusion of Human-Robot Collaborative cells is prevented by some barriers. Classical control approaches seem not yet fully suitable for facing variability conveyed by the presence of human operators beside robots. Heterogeneous knowledge representation capabilities and abstract reasoning are crucial to enhance flexibility of control solutions....

During the last decade, industrial collaborative robots have entered assembly cells supporting human workers in repetitive and physical demanding operations. Such human-robot collaboration (HRC) scenarios entail many open issues. The deployment of highly flexible and adaptive plan-based controllers is capable of preserving productivity while enforc...

The ultimate goal of automated planning is the execution of plans by an artificial agent in the environment. When interactions and collaboration with humans are considered, robust plan execution requires even more highly flexible and adaptable control capabilities in artificial agents. Therefore, plan-based controllers should effectively deal with...

This paper presents a newborn collaboration between heterogeneous AI competences. In particular, it describes current work on the integration of machine learning techniques for the automatic generation of contents for an Intelligent Tutoring System grounded on automated planning techniques. The joint use of these two approaches allows on the one ha...

Timeline-based Planning and Scheduling (P&S) usually deals with two main sources of uncertainty: some components may depend on an external environment and cannot be planned; there may be tasks whose duration cannot be exactly foreseen in advance. Such uncertainties are formally defined and consequent controllability issues have been addressed, focu...

Social Robotics is a research field aiming at designing robots able to interact with people in a natural manner. Within the domain of Socially Assistive Robotics the capability of adapting and personaliz- ing behaviors and assistive services of robots, according to the specific assistive context and needs of a person is crucial to improve the effi-...

Background: Mild cognitive impairment and mild dementia progressively compromise the ability of people to live independently and can have a negative impact on their quality of life. Within the current European Active and Assisted Living programme (AAL), project TV-AssistDem has been developed to deliver a TV-based platform service to support patie...

Modern production systems are increasingly using artificial agents (e.g., robots) of different kinds. Ideally, these agents should be able to recognize the state of the world, to act optimizing their work toward the achievement of a set of goals, to change the plan of action when problems arise, and to collaborate with other artificial and human ag...

Modern automation systems are asked to provide a step change toward flexibility and reconfigurability to cope with increasing demand for fast changing and highly fragmented production—which is more and more characterising the manufacturing sector. This reflects in the transition from traditional hierarchical and centralised control architecture to...

A new generation of Intelligent Robots are entering our working and living environments, taking care of human-level tasks. Such robotic systems are becoming more and more important also in healthcare assistance for elderly. Indeed, recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics are fostering the diffusion of robotic agents with the cap...

Recent technological advancements in Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical systems are fostering the diffusion of smart environments relying on sensor networks. Indeed, large and heterogeneous amount of data can be provided by sensors deployed in user environments providing valuable knowledge to address different user needs and enabling more effect...

IoT technology integrated in smart home environments produces a huge and heterogeneous amount of data that can be used to characterize events that occur inside an environment as well as activities that a person is performing. The knowledge that can be extracted from such data can be used to proactively facilitate the daily living of the person with...

Sponsor is an AAL project that aims at developing, testing and implementing an ICT platform to facilitate the posting, browsing and exchange of key information between competence-offering seniors and search-based requests from competence-demanding organizations within the public, private and voluntary sectors. This paper describes a specific aspect...

The “Città Educante” project aims at radically rethinking the learning environments through the application of the most advanced ICT technology. Among the different aspects of the project, the LECTurE module aims, by exploiting artificial intelligence techniques, at proposing contextualized lessons, as well as interaction requests, to the involved...

This paper describes the work pursued within the TV-assistdem project, an AAL initiative, the aim of which is to develop a technological tool to facilitate remote support to patients affected by Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). The idea is to exploit TV-based transmission of data and video-interactivity among health-professionals, patients, caregiv...

The deployment of autonomous robots capable to both socially interact and proactively offer support to human users in a common life scenario remains challenging despite the recent technical advancements. For instance, research for endowing autonomous robots with the capability of acting in “non-ideal” and partially observable environments as well a...

This paper describes how explicit resource reasoning is added within an existing temporal planning framework that uses timelines as plan representation. The work is grounded on a recent formalization of timeline-based planning that here is extended to model and reason over resources. The formal account is then fully implemented as an extension of t...

This paper describes how explicit resource reasoning is added within an existing temporal planning framework that uses timelines as plan representation. The work is grounded on a recent formalization of timeline-based planning that here is extended to model and reason over resources. The formal account is then fully implemented as an extension of t...

This paper describes how explicit resource reasoning is added within an existing temporal planning framework that uses timelines as plan representation. The work is grounded on a recent formalization of timeline-based planning that here is extended to model and reason over resources. The formal account is then fully implemented as an extension of t...

This article describes a systematic investigation on the expectations of potential users of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies.More specifically it describes the efforts made to elicit users expectations for services of an AAL system that aims to both monitor older people fostering their independent living and preventing dangerous situation...

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are facilitating the deployment of intelligent systems in manufacturing. In Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC), industrial robots offer accuracy and efficiency while humans guarantee both experience and specialized and not replaceable skills. The seamless coordination of such different abilities constitu...

Background: Among various solutions to aid the aging population, the research community is focusing on assistive robotics that may help to delay admission to care facilities by fostering independence of older people in their homes. This paper presents the Robot-Era project and experimentation aimed at investigating 1) the psychological attitude of...

This paper presents a novel planning framework, called PLATINUm that advances the state of the art with the ability of dealing with temporal uncertainty both at planning and plan execution level. PLATINUm is a comprehensive planning system endowed with (i) a new algorithm for temporal planning with uncertainty, (ii) heuristic search capabilities gr...

This paper describes a pilot application developed by the authors within a project in the area of elders assistance. Specifically, the work addresses the problem of assigning scheduled activities to a set of volunteers by means of an interactive tool that considers both users’ needs/preferences and constraints posed by the organization that manages...

This paper presents a novel planning framework, called PLATINUm that advances the state of the art with the ability of dealing with temporal uncertainty both at planning and plan execution level. PLATINUm is a comprehensive planning system endowed with (i) a new algorithm for temporal planning with uncertainty, (ii) heuristic search capabilities gr...

Introduction: This article describes an enhanced telepresence robot named ROBIN, part of a telecare system derived from the GIRAFFPLUS project for supporting and monitoring older adults at home. ROBIN is integrated in a sensor-rich environment that aims to continuously monitor physical and psychological wellbeing of older persons living alone. The...

The current work presents the SPEAKYACUTATTILE system, a computer based platform designed to enable its users to access a number of ICT services such as house management, health status monitoring or recreational services. It is deeply grounded on voice interaction and represents a Spoken Language System (SLS) meant to be a sort of intelligent assis...

This paper describes the work done on a telepresence robot named GIRAFF and part of a telecare AAL system derived from the GIRAFFPLUS project for supporting and monitoring elderly people at home. Specifically, from the long term trials in real houses, a number of user requirements have emerged that inspired changes and improvements on the robotic p...

This article reports on the EU project ExCITE with specific focus on the technical development of the telepresence platform over a period of 42 months. The aim of the project was to assess the robustness and validity of the mobile robotic telepresence (MRP) system Giraff as a means to support elderly people and to foster their social interaction an...

The “timeline-based” is a particular paradigm of temporal planning that has been successfully applied in many real-world scenarios. Different timeline-based planning systems have been developed, each using its own planning specification language and solving techniques. An analysis of the differences between such kind systems has not been addressed...

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems should offer services to the users that should be designed, tested, and delivered in real scenarios to gain robustness. This paper explores the issues of creating end-to-end services for older adults and their caregivers deploying an AAL system at home. It describes the work done for designing added value servi...

The paper describes a novel use of planning in Reconfigurable Manufacturing. Authors considered the nodes of a manufacturing plant as individual AI-based agents able to reason on continuously updated representation of their domain model, plan their own actions, and execute them. The paper aims at clarifying the role of planning, its connection with...

Telepresence robotic systems are proposed in different contexts and specifically in the area of social robotics for assisting older adults at home. Similarly to other robotic systems, such robots are often designed and then evaluated in laboratory settings for a limited period of time. Lab-based evaluations present limitations because they do not t...

The paper describes a novel use of planning in Reconfigurable Manufacturing. Authors considered the nodes of a manufacturing plant as individual AI-based agents able to reason on continuously updated representation of their domain model, plan their own actions, and execute them. The paper aims at clarifying the role of planning, its connection with...