Page 342 - Handbook of Electronic Assistive Technology

Chapter 11 • Robotics 331

Table 11-2 Socially Assistive Robots

Robot Company/Project References
AIBO Sony Kaplan (2000)
Care-O-Bot Fraunhofer IPA Schaeffer and May (1999)
CompanionAble The European FP7 Project CompanionAble (2008–12) Gross et al. (2011)
Huggable Massachusetts Institute of Technology Santos (2012)
iCAT EU FP7 ICT-215554 project LIREC German Research van Breemen et al. (2005)
Foundation (DFG) within the SFB 673 – Alignment in
Communication – Project C2
MeBot The Digital Life and Things That Think Consortia Adalgeirsson and Breazeal (2010)
NAO Aldebaran-Robotics Gouaillier et al. (2009)
Nexi National Science Foundation Research Grants BCS Fink (2012)
08-27084
NurseBot Information Technology Research ITR Program (Grant Pollack (2002)
No. 0085796)
Paro Intelligent System Co., Ltd Kidd et al. (2006)
QRIO Socially Intelligent Machines Lab (designed by Carla Geppert (2004)
Diana and Meka Robotics)
RIBA Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from Japan Society Mukai et al. (2010)
for the Promotion of Science
USC Robot National Science Foundation under Grants IIS-0713697, Fasola and Mataric (2010)
CNS-0709296 and IIS-1117279

available are not able to replace human care. It is paramount that both SARs and human
interaction work hand in hand. If the component of human caregiver interaction is no
longer in place, there is a concern over the user’s increased isolation, despite therapeutic
benefits (Feil-Seifer and Mataric, 2011).
Some of the more popular SARs in research papers are listed in Table 11-2.
The Huggable Robot (Santos, 2012) is the creation of the Personal Robots Group, MIT.
This robot was designed to look like a teddy bear, as a symbol of comfort for paediat-
ric users. The Huggable has two modes of function: (1) being a fully autonomous robot
the Huggable is able to interpret and respond to human interactions with it, and (2) the
Huggable is able to work as a semi-autonomous robot avatar, which can be controlled on
some level.
PARO was created by Takanori Shibata from the Intelligent System Research Institute
in Japan (Kidd et al., 2006). It is modelled after a baby harp seal and is programmed to
respond to touch using simple sound and movement. PARO is mostly used as a compan-
ion robot. Several studies have been conducted particularly on its use with people with
dementia. In one study, where PARO was left in the public space of a nursing home, resi-
dents saw an increase in social activity through interaction with PARO.
To date studies using these SAR devices are generally small scale, i.e., a limited number
of participants. However, this is a growing field of research interest.