Our project aims at developing social robots. There are 2 focus topics: social navigation and human-robot interaction. For social navigation, robot learns how to navigate in a more human-friendly way by deep learning. For HRI, we propose robot-assisted reminiscence, memory aid and emotional support functions. With these functions, robot can bring joy and comfort to lonely elders.

We build a new dataset collecting pedestrian’s trajectory and acceleration data of first-person-view camera. With deep learning, our robot can do social navigation friendly. By utilizing image reasoning, emotional analysis, reinforcement learning, natural language understanding and memory retrieval techniques, our robot can have deep conversations with human in specific topics.

With the population of seniors expected to rise, social robots are being one of the solutions to the severe shortage of human caregivers. We are cooperating with nursing home and hospital to verify that our social robot does provide supports to elderly. In the near future, we will cooperate with domestic hardware manufacturers to develop Taiwan’s companion robots.