Antonio Bandera

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Malaga

The idea of introducing a robot into an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environment to provide additional services beyond those provided by the environment itself has been explored in numerous projects. Moreover, new opportunities can arise from this symbiosis, which usually requires both systems to share the knowledge (and not just the data) they ca...

The aging of the population in developed and developing countries, together with the degree of maturity reached by certain technologies, means that the design of care environments for the elderly with a high degree of technological innovation is now being seriously considered. Assistive environments for daily living (Ambient Assisted Living, AAL) i...

The last decades have seen a revolution in autonomous robotics. Deep learning approaches and their hardware implementations have made it possible to endow robots with extraordinary perceptual capabilities. In addition, they can benefit from advances in Automated Planning, allowing them to autonomously solve complex tasks. However, on many occasions...

The development of digital health technologies allows, among other advantages, the remote monitoring of patients’ state of health. In this context, smartphones have become Telemedicine tools, as they have a high computational capacity and are equipped with sensors that make them aware of their environment and allow remote interaction. However, as i...

Neural networks are the state-of-the-art solution to image-processing tasks. Some of these neural networks are relatively simple, but the popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can consist of hundreds of layers. Unfortunately, the excellent recognition accuracy of CNNs comes at the cost of very high computational complexity, and one of the cu...

In the past few years, there has been an increase in commercial and research focus on service robots operating in daily surroundings. These machines are anticipated to function independently in busy settings, enhancing movement efficiency and safety parameters, as well as social acceptance. Expanding conventional path planning modules to include so...

The deployment of an iris recognition framework highlighted the relevance of developing a presentation attack detection (PAD) approach. The objective of this approach is to verify whether the acquired iris pattern is real or not. Impersonation attacks against an iris recogniser could be carried out by counterfeiting the natural iris patterns with f...

One of the main challenges faced by iris recognition systems is to be able to work with people in motion, where the sensor is at an increasing distance (more than 1 m) from the person. The ultimate goal is to make the system less and less intrusive and require less cooperation from the person. When this scenario is implemented using a single static...

In recent years, commercial and research interest in service robots working in everyday environments has grown. These devices are expected to move autonomously in crowded environments, maximizing not only movement efficiency and safety parameters, but also social acceptability. Extending traditional path planning modules with socially aware criteri...

Plankton are an important component of life on Earth. Since the 19th century, scientists have attempted to quantify species distributions using many techniques, such as direct counting, sizing, and classification with microscopes. Since then, extraordinary work has been performed regarding the development of plankton imaging systems, producing a ma...

Although the global population is aging, the proportion of potential caregivers is not keeping pace. It is necessary for society to adapt to this demographic change, and new technologies are a powerful resource for achieving this. New tools and devices can help to ease independent living and alleviate the workload of caregivers. Among them, sociall...

The experience of inner speech is a common one for humans, playing a relevant role in generating spontaneous responses to the context but also in regulating how we think and behave. Intimately tied to our sense of self, the inner speech provides, via a mechanism of internalization, a running monologue of thoughts. This monologue plays a basic role...

Within the realm of new robotics, researchers have placed a great amount of effort into learning, understanding, and representing knowledge for task execution by robots [...]

Service robotics involves the design of robots that work in a dynamic and very open environment, usually shared with people. In this scenario, it is very difficult for decision-making processes to be completely closed at design time, and it is necessary to define a certain variability that will be closed at runtime. MAPE-K (Monitor–Analyze–Plan–Exe...

The increasing ageing of the European population is an unstoppable process causing more and more demand for health and social assistance resources. The Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is an indispensable tool to identify the psychosocial and functional limitations of geriatric patients. The problem is that the CGA process is very long and...

The detection of a person’s eyes is a basic task in applications as important as iris recognition in biometric identification or fatigue detection in driving assistance systems. Current commercial and research systems use software frameworks that require a dedicated computer, whose power consumption, size and price are significantly large. This pap...

The design of robots capable of operating autonomously in changing and unstructured environments, requires using complex software architectures in which, typically, robot engineers manually hard-code adaptation mechanisms allowing the robot to deal with certain situations. As adaptation is closely related with context monitoring, deliberation and a...

The introduction of robots in the real world requires previous evaluation of the envisaged performance. Factors like usability, user experience, social acceptance, or societal impact, among others, have been taken into account in evaluation frameworks defined during the last years. However, one of the most important factors that need to be evaluate...

Dealing with variability in open-ended environments requires robots to adapt themselves according to the perceived situation in order to achieve the required quality of service (defined in terms of safety, performance or energy consumption, among other criteria). In this sense, context awareness and runtime self-adaptation allows moving autonomous...

Robotics Cognitive Architectures (RCA) are becoming a key element in the design of robots that need to be aware of its surrounding space and of their role in it. This is especially important for robots that interact with people in household, eldercare or industrial collaborative scenarios. We have proposed in earlier works an RCA called CORTEX desi...

Navigation is an essential capability in most robotic solutions, being basic in scenarios such as inspection and maintenance, or factory intralogistics. Moreover, with the advance of service robotics and its increasing use in all kinds of real-world applications, nowadays, robots are expected to operate well in unstructured and dynamic environments...

Robotics Cognitive Architectures (RCA) are becoming a key element in the design of robots that need to be aware of its surrounding space and of their role in it. This is especially important for robots that interact with people in household, eldercare or industrial collaborative scenarios. We have proposed in earlier works an RCA called CORTEX desi...

Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is an integrated clinical process to evaluate frail elderly people in order to create therapy plans that improve their quality and quantity of life. The whole process includes the completion of standardized questionnaires or specific movements, which are performed by the patient and do not necessarily requir...

One of the aims of cognitive robotics is to endow robots with the ability to plan solutions for complex goals and then to enact those plans. Additionally, robots should react properly upon encountering unexpected changes in their environment that are not part of their planned course of actions. This requires a close coupling between deliberative an...

Virtual assistants such as Cortana or Google Assistant are becoming familiar devices in everyday environments, where they are used to control real devices through natural language. This paper extends this application scenario, and it describes the use of the Alexa assistant from Amazon through an Echo dot device to drive the behaviour of a robotic...

The increasing ageing of the European population is an unstoppable process causing more and more demand for health and social assistance resources. The Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is an indispensable tool to identify the psychosocial and functional limitations of geriatric patients. The problem is that the CGA process is very long and...

CORTEX is a cognitive robotics architecture inspired by three key ideas: modularity, internal modelling and graph representations. CORTEX is also a computational framework designed to support early forms of intelligence in human interacting robots by selecting, a priori, a functional decomposition of the capabilities of the robot. This set of abili...

Currently robots are evolving into an increasing complexity and have to support a large workload that directly affects their functions. To compensate this situation they must make a better use of their available resources while behaving in a reliable way. The goal of this project is to endow Shelly, the social robot created by RoboLab with a predic...

Service robot are acquiring significant importance on everyday scenarios. They are able to provide relevant services to human beings like household tasks or helping senior people to live independently. Nevertheless, some tasks, such as cooking or grasping objects cannot be provided without equipping the robot with robotic arms. However, on many occ...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Computational Topology in Image Context, CTIC 2019, held in Málaga, Spain, in January 2019. The 14 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. Papers deal with theoretical issues but most of them put the attention on the applica...

The goal of the LifeBots project is the study and development of long-life mechanisms that facilitate and improve the integration of robotics platforms in smart homes to support elder and handicapped people. Specifically the system aims to design, build and validate an assistive ecosystem formed by a person living in a smart home with a social robo...

Non-functional properties are an essential part of any software solution. There is a lot of literature on what non-functional properties are but, unfortunately, there is also a lot of disagreement and different points of view on how to deal with them. Non-functional properties, such as safety or dependability, become particularly relevant in the co...

During the last decade, sampling based methods for motion and path planning have gained more interest. Specifically, in the field of robotics, approaches based on the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm have become the customary technique for solving the single-query motion planning problem. However, dynamic large maps still represent a c...

Social robots need to understand human activities, dynamics, and the intentions behind their behaviors. Most of the time, this implies the modeling of the whole scene. The recognition of the activities and intentions of a person are inferred from the perception of the individual, but also from their interactions with the rest of the environment (i....

Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is an integrated clinical process to evaluate the frailty of elderly persons in order to create therapy plans that improve their quality of life. For robotizing these tests, we are designing and developing CLARC, a mobile robot able to help the physician to capture and manage data during the CGA procedures,...

NAOTherapist is a cognitive robotic architecture whose main goal is to develop non-contact upper-limb rehabilitation sessions autonomously with a social robot for patients with physical impairments. In order to achieve a fluent interaction and an active engagement with the patients, the system should be able to adapt by itself in accordance with th...

The choice of using a robotic architecture and one of its possible implementations is one of the most crucial design decisions when developing robots. Such decision affects the whole development process, the limitations of the robot, and changing minds can be prohibitively time consuming. This paper presents the redesign and the most relevant imple...

The Robotics Cognitive Architecture CORTEX is introduced along with two use cases where itis being applied.

Collaboration is an essential feature of human social interaction. Briefly, when two or more people agree on a common goal and a joint intention to reach that goal, they have to coordinate their actions to engage in joint actions, planning their courses of actions according to the actions of the other partners. The same holds for teams where the pa...

There exist image processing applications, such as tracking or pattern recognition, that are not necessarily precise enough to maintain the same resolution across the whole image sensor. In fact, they must only keep it as high as possible in a relatively small region, but covering a wide field of view. This is the aim of foveal vision systems. Brie...

Enabling autonomous mobile manipulators to collaborate with people is a challenging research field with a wide range of applications. Collaboration means working with a partner to reach a common goal and it involves performing both, individual and joint actions, with her. Human-robot collaboration requires, at least, two conditions to be efficient:...

Robot navigation and manipulation in partially known indoor environments is usually organized as two complementary activities, local displacement control and global path planning. Both activities have to be connected across different space and time scales in order to obtain a smooth and responsive system that follows the path and adapts to the unfo...

Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is an integrated clinical procedure to evaluate frail old people status and create therapy plans to improve their quality and quantity of life. In this paper we present CLARC, a mobile robot able to receive the patient and his family, accompany them to the medical consulting room and, once there, help the ph...

The choice of using a robotic architecture and one of its possible implementations is one of the most crucial design decisions when developing robots. Such decision affects the whole development process, the limitations of the robot, and changing minds can be prohibitively time consuming. This paper presents the reviewed design and the most relevan...

Robots require a close coupling of perception and action. Cognitive robots go beyond this to require a further coupling with cognition. From the perspective of robotics, this coupling generally emphasizes a tightly integrated perceptuomo-tor system, which is then loosely connected to some limited form of cognitive system such as a planner. At the o...

Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is an integrated clinical procedure to evaluate frail old people status and create therapy plans to improve their quality and quantity of life. In this paper we present CLARC, a mobile robot able to receive the patient and his family, accompany them to the medical consulting room and, once there, help the ph...

Robots require a close coupling of perception and action. Cognitive robots go beyond this to require a further coupling with cognition. From the perspective of robotics, this coupling generally emphasizes a tightly integrated perceptuomo-tor system, which is then loosely connected to some limited form of cognitive system such as a planner. At the o...

The goal of this work is to automatically detect and classify a set of geoenvironmental zones of interest in panchromatic aerial images. Focused on a specific area, the zones to be detected are vegetation/mangrove, degradation/desertification, interface water-sediment and plain. These zones are very interesting from a geological point of view due t...

This paper presents a novel attention-based cognitive architecture for a social robot. This architecture aims to join perception and reasoning considering a double interplay: the current task biases the perceptual process whereas perceived items determine the behaviours to be accomplished, considering the present context and role of the agent. Ther...

Robot navigation and manipulation in partially known indoor environments is usually organized as two complementary activities, local displacement control and global path planning. Both activities have to be connected across different space and time scales in order to obtain a smooth and responsive system that follows the path and adapts to the unfo...

Enabling autonomous mobile manipulators to collaborate with people is a challenging research field with a wide range of applications. Collaboration means working with a partner to reach a common goal and it involves performing both, individual and joint actions, with her. Human-robot collaboration requires, at least, two conditions to be efficient:...

This paper presents a novel attention-based cognitive architecture for a social robot. This architecture aims to join perception and reasoning considering a double interplay: the current task biases the perceptual process whereas perceived items determine the behaviours to be accomplished, considering the present context and role of the agent. Ther...

This paper describes a robotics cognitive architecture for social robots named CORTEX. This architecture integrates different levels of abstraction (from basic geometry to high-level predicates) into a unique Deep Space Representation (DSR) that different agents interface. These agents update the contents of the DSR with new data from the outer wor...

This paper describes the genesis of Gualzru, a robot commissioned by a large Spanish technological company to provide advertisement services in open public spaces. Gualzru has to stand by at an interactive panel observing the people passing by and, at some point, select a promising candidate and approach her to initiate a conversation. After a smal...

Over the past decades, the number of robots deployed in museums, trade shows and exhibitions have grown steadily. This new application domain has become a key research topic in the robotics community. Therefore, new robots are designed to interact with people in these domains, using natural and intuitive channels. Visual perception and speech proce...

Motor rehabilitation therapy pursuits the recovery of damaged areas from the repetitive practice of certain motor activities. The patient's recovery directly depends on the adherence to rehabilitation therapy. Conventional methods consisting of repetitions usually make the patient feel unmotivated and neglect complying with the appropriate treatmen...

RGB-D cameras are not only able to provide color (Red-Green-Blue -RGB-) information from the scene but also a relatively accurate cloud of 3D points. Using information coming from this organized cloud, it is possible to define around each image pixel a small planar patch and obtain its normal vector. Within the framework of the combinatorial pyrami...

Background: Neurorehabilitation therapies exploiting the use-dependent plasticity of our neuromuscular system are devised to help patients who suffer from injuries or diseases of this system. These therapies take advantage of the fact that the motor activity alters the properties of our neurons and muscles, including the pattern of their connectiv...

Artificial vision systems cannot process all the information that they receive from the world in real time because it is highly expensive and inefficient in terms of computational cost. Inspired by biological perception systems, artificial attention models pursuit to select only the relevant part of the scene. On human vision, it is also well estab...

A rehabilitation therapy usually derives from general goals set by the medical expert, who requests the patient to attend sessions during a certain time period in order to help him regaining mobility, strength and/or flexibility. The therapist must transform these general goals manually into a set of exercises distributed over different rehabilitat...

Complex robotic tasks require the coordination of a considerable amount of skills. This is generally achieved generating and ex-ecuting action plans that fulfill the precon-ditions of the given objective. These tasks can be highly dynamic, since the appearance of new objects or unexpected situations is a constant during the plan execution. In this...

Complex robotic tasks require the coordination of a considerable amount of skills. This is generally achieved generating and executing action plans that fulfill the preconditions of the given objective. These tasks can be highly dynamic, since the appearance of new objects or unexpected situations is a constant during the plan execution. In this co...

Learning by imitation allows people to teach social robots new tasks using natural and intuitive interaction channels. Vision is the main of these channels. This chapter describes a learning-by-imitation architecture that uses stereo vision to perceive, recognize, learn, and imitate social gestures.This description is based on the identification of...

Traditional neuro-rehabilitation therapies are usually repet-itive and lengthy, reducing motivation and adherence to the treatment and thus limiting the benefits for the patients. Moreover, exercises are usually not customizable for the patients, further increasing their disen-gagement with the treatment. The outcome is then a boring session day af...

Developing a simple multimodal interaction game with a 31 dof's mobile manipulator can become a challenging enterprise. A conceptually simple task quickly unfolds into a rather complex ensemble of driver-oriented, framework-based, software-enabled, state-machine controlled mechatronics. In this paper we propose a multimodal interaction game designe...

Exploiting the use-dependent plasticity of our neu-romuscular system, neuro-rehabilitation therapies are devised to help patients that suffer from injuries or diseases in this system, such as those caused by brain damage before or during birth or in the first years of life (e.g. due to cerebral palsy or obstetric brachial plexus palsy). These thera...

With the aim of endowing robots with the ability to engage people in real social interactions, it is currently typical that novel architectures for robot control take into account in its internal design concepts and schemes originated from cognitive theories. The objective is that robots will be able to emanate responses at human interaction rates...

Research on the brain information processing has focused on the interrelationships among cognitive processes. Thus, it is currently well-established that the units of attention on human vision are not merely spatial but closely related to perceptual objects. This implies a strong relationship between segmentation and attention processes. This inter...

Keyframe detection is a fundamental component in approaches for large-scale mapping and scene recognition. Assuming that the detection is applied to a set of continuously captured frames, this paper presents a keyframe detector that not only considers the frame content to quantify appearance changes on the sequence, but also the temporal accumulati...

Object detection is one of the key components in computer vision systems. Current research on this topic has shifted from holistic approaches to representations of individual object parts linked by structural information. Along this line of research, this paper presents a novel part-based approach for automatic object detection using 2D images. The...

Computer vision systems have to deal with thousands, sometimes millions of pixel values from each frame, and the computational complexity of many problems related to the interpretation of image data is very high. The task becomes especially difficult if a system has to operate in real-time. Within the Combinatorial Pyramid framework, the proposed c...

Combinatorial pyramids represent the image as a stack of successively reduced combinatorial maps, which encode the whole image at different levels of abstraction. Within this framework, this paper proposes to conduct the perceptual organization of the image content in two consecutive stages. The first stage builds the lower set of levels of the hie...

Social robots must adapt to dynamic environments, human interaction partners and challenging new stringent tasks. Their inner software is usually distributed and should be designed and deployed carefully because slight changes in the robot's requirements can have an important impact not only on the existing source code but also on the resulting per...

Monocular approaches to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) have recently addressed with success the challenging problem of the fast computation of dense reconstructions from a single, moving camera. Thus, if these approaches initially relied on the detection of a reduced set of interest points to estimate the camera position and the map,...