i–Walk: Intelligent Robotic Walker for mobility and cognitive assistance of elderly and motor-impaired people
Official Website: http://www.i-walk.gr/
About the Project
The i-Walk project aims at developing and testing a new pioneering robotic system that will provide a range of mobility and cognitive support functions for people that face different degrees of mobility and cognitive problems.
In this project, the following methodologies will be developed and synergistically utilized: (a) processing of multi-sensory and physiological signals and identification of actions for the monitoring, analysis and prediction of human gait and other actions of the user, (b) behavioral and user-adaptive robot control and autonomous robot navigation for the dynamic approach of the user and the interactive co-occurrence combined also with voice guidance; (c) human-robot communication, including speech synthesis and recognition technologies and a virtual assistant (avatar) to enhance the naturalness of communication
- WP1: User needs and clinical evaluation
- T1.1: User needs
- T1.2: Data collection and annotation
- T1.3: Clinical evaluation
- WP2. Processing and Recognition of MultiSensory Signals
- T2.1: Gait tracking and analysis using laser sensors
- T2.2: Visual Sensing, Human Tracking, and Action Recognition
- T2.3: Voice Command Recognition
- T2.4: Smart sensors for tracking and processing of physiological signals
- WP3. Control and motion planning of robotic platform
- T3.1: Control of autonomous motion of robotic platform
- T3.2: Robotic navigation
- T3.3: Human robot interaction control and user mobility assistance functionality
- WP4 Human-Machine Interaction
- T4.1: Human-Machine Interaction Design
- T4.2: Dialog management
- T4.3: Interaction via voice
- WP5. Robotic Platform Design and Implementation of Integrated System
- T5.1: Needs analysis and design of robotic platform parameters
- T5.2: Design and implementation of platform hardware
- T5.3: Design and implementation of platform software
- WP6: Commercial exploitation of results
 | Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, National Technical University of Athens, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Intelligent Robotics and Automation Laborator, Greece P.I. & Scientific Director: Prof. Petros Maragos Team: Assoc. Prof. Costas Tzafestas Dr. George Moustris Georgia Chalvatzaki Athanasios Dometios Petros Koutras Paraskevas Oikonomou Antigoni Tsiami |
 | Institute for Language and Speech Processing Athena Research and Innovation Center P.I.: Dr. Stavroula-Evita Fotinea Team: Dr. Eleni Efthymiou Dr. Ioannis Koumpouros Dr. Xanthi Papageorgiou Theodoros Goulas Anna Vacalopoulou |
 | Diaplasis Rehabilitation Center S.A., Greece P.I.: Dr. Alexandra Karavasili |
 | SenseWorks, Greece P.I.: Nikolaos Papastamatiou |
2020 |
User-centered Implementation of Rehabilitation Exercising on an Assistive Robotic Platform Conference 22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2020. |
STAViS: Spatio-Temporal AudioVisual Saliency Network Conference IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Seattle, USA, 2020. |
2019 |
Learn to adapt to human walking: A Model-based Reinforcement Learning Approach for a Robotic Assistant Rollator Journal Article IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (with IROS option), 4 (4), pp. 3774–3781, 2019. |
Comparing the Impact of Robotic Rollator Control Schemes on Elderly Gait using on-line LRF-based Gait Analysis Conference Proc. Workshop on Mobile Robot Assistants for the Elderly (MoRobAE) in 2019 IEEE Int’l Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Montreal, Canada, 2019. |
On-line Human Gait Stability Prediction using LSTMs for the fusion of Deep-based Pose Estimation and LRF-based Augmented Gait State Estimation in an Intelligent Robotic Rollator Conference IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), Montreal, Canada, 2019. |
User Centered Design in Practice – Adapting HRI to Real User Needs Conference Proc. PETRA 2019, Island of Rhodes, Greece, 2019. |
User Centered HRI Design for an Intelligent Robotic Rollator Conference Proc. Workshop on Mobile Robot Assistants for the Elderly (MoRobAE) in 2019 IEEE Int’l Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Montreal, Canada, 2019. |
A behaviorally inspired fusion approach for computational audiovisual saliency modeling Journal Article Signal Processing: Image Communication, 76 , pp. 186 - 200, 2019. |
SUSiNet: See, Understand and Summarize it Conference Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 2019. |
Presentation of achieved results at conferences and workshops
- 20-24 May 2019: ICCS and ILSP/Athena RC participated in ICRA 2019 and ICRA 2019 Workshop and presented i-Walk results.
- 5-7 June 2019: ILSP/Athena RC and DIAPLASIS participated in PETRA 2019 and presented i-Walk results.
- 16-20 June 2019: ICCS participated in CVPR 2019 and presented i-Walk results.
- 22-25 September 2019: ICCS participated in ICIP 2019 and presented i-Walk results (demo).
- 4-8 November 2019: ICCS participated in IROS 2019 and presented i-Walk results.
- 14-19 June 2020: ICCS participated in CVPR 2020 and presented i-Walk results.
- 19-24 July 2020: ILSP/Athena RC participated in HCI 2020 and presented i-Walk results.
Invited Talks
- An invited talk was given by P. Maragos at the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan in Sep 2019, titled Multisensory Video Processing and Learning For Human-Robot Interaction.
- A. Vacalopoulou, X. S. Papageorgiou, S.-E. Fotinea, E. Efthimiou, “Multimodal human data capturing in the context of building communication models for human-machine interaction and Sign Language recognition”, Workshop: Measurements in Linguistic Studies, December 2019, Athens.
- A. Karavasili, “The use of robotic technology in rehabilitation”, Department of Medicine, University of Thessaly, May 2020.
- A. Karavasili, “The role of multidisciplinary rehabilitation in health and well being”, PETRA 2020, Greece, July 2020.
i-Walk related actions
- All partners demonstrated the i-Walk project to representatives of the EC DG for Regional and
Urban Policy, 13/11/2019, Athens. - The i-Walk workshop was held with success on Wednesday 26/02/2020 at the Athena Research and Innovation Center premises. The workshop included presentations with the i-Walk results and its future directions from members of the project’s teams as well as presentations from external invited researchers.
- ILSP/Athena RC demonstrated the i-Walk project in the Human Brain Project Open Day, 3-
6/2/2020, Athens. - ILSP/Athena RC demonstrated the i-Walk project in the “30 years Athena RC” Workshop 18/11/2019, Athens.
- The i-Walk project and its results were presented in IROS2019 by ICCS.
- P. Koutras, G. Chalvatzaki , A. Tsiami, A. Nikolakakis, C. S. Tzafestas, and P. Maragos,“Video Processing and Learning in Assistive Robotic Applications”, Demo in ICIP 2019, Taipei, Taiwan, Sep. 2019.
- ILSP/Athena RC gave a key-note speech to Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Conference 2019, 23-25 May 2019, Vienna, Austria:
Speaker: Eleni Efthimiou
Title: Increasing user acceptance by augmented robot intelligence: the lesson we got from the semantics of human communication - ILSP/Athena RC organized a workshop titled “AR4U Workshop: The 2nd Workshop on Assistive Robots: Technological Challenges and the User Perspective”, in the context of the 12th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference, held on the Island of Rhodes, Greece, June 5-7, 2019. Workshop link: http://www.petrae.org/workshops/AR.html
- ILSP/Athena RC demonstrated i-Walk in the 84th International Expo of Thessaloniki, Greece 7 Sep- 15 Sep 2019.
- ICCS presented an i-Walk related tutorial at ICIP2019, 22-25 September 2019, Taipei, Taiwan
Tutorial Title: Multisensory Video Processing and Learning For Human-Robot Interaction
Tutorial Presenters: Petros Maragos, Petros Koutras - ILSP/Athena RC and ICCS demonstrated the i-Walk project in the European Researchers’ Night 2019.
Latest news
ICCS presented i-Walk results in IROS2019, Nov. 2019, Macau, China!
