Supervisors: Kamal Gupta (ENSC), Carlo Menon (ENSC), and Andrew Sixsmith (Gerontology)

Number of available positions: One

Background: Assisted living

Wikipedia: “Assisted living facilities provide supervision or assistance with activities of daily living; coordination of services by outside health care providers; and monitoring of resident activities to help to ensure their health, safety, and well-being. Assistance may include the administration or supervision of medication, or personal care services provided by a trained staff person. Assisted living as it exists today emerged in the 1990s as an eldercare alternative on the continuum of care for people, normally seniors, for whom independent living is no longer appropriate but who do not need the 24-hour medical care provided by a nursing home. Assisted living is a philosophy of care and services promoting independence and dignity.”

Goal to be achieved

The goal of this project is to develop a mobile platform for assisting seniors in their daily living. The specific task to be demonstrated in this project is identified by the following sequence of actions:

1)    The robot is instructed to look for a specific object, such as keys, in a domestic environment.

2)    The robot autonomously navigates and identifies the keys.

3)    The robot picks up the keys.

4)    The robot brings back the keys to the person (hereafter called “robot’s owner).

In order to simplify the above-mentioned task, tags will be fixed to both keys and robot’s owner.

Available equipment and expertise

The undergraduate student involved in this research will have access to a mobile robot carrying a robotic arm in the RAMP Lab (Kamal Gupta). The available mobile robot is already capable of autonomously navigating. Such a platform has a user-friendly interface, which allows programming the robot by using C++ language.

The student will be supervised by the three instructors and will receive support from graduate students currently working on the above-mentioned hardware.

Tasks to be performed by the student

1)    Identify tags to be fixed to keys and robot’s owner

2)    Identify a strategy to localize such tags and enable the robot to navigate towards them.

3)    Develop a simple grasping system to be placed at the tip of the robotic arm. Such a system should be used to pick up the keys once localized. Such a system could be based on the use of a simple magnet.

4)    Identify sensors suitable to assess if the keys have been grasped.

5)    Test the system in SFU lab environment.

6)    Tests the system in a simulated home environment (Tong Louie Living Laboratory, http://www.sfu.ca/livinglab)

Required skills:

Prerequisite: at least 100 credit hours.

Prerequisite: good C++ programming skills.

The candidate should be eager to contribute in applied research.

Important notes:

1)    The instructors plan to involve the student on scientific publications resulting from this work.

2)    This project could be a coop internship, or a Special Project Course (ENSC 494), or an undergraduate thesis.