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Personal Robotic Assistants For The Elderly (Pearl)
This project is no longer active.

Heads: Sara Kiesler and Sebastian Thrun
Contact: Sara Kiesler (kiesler@cs.cmu.edu)

Mailing address:
MRT Center
The Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890
(412) 268 6553 (Jim Osborn, Executive Director)
(412) 268 6436 (FAX)

Associated center: MRTC
Associated lab/group: Robot Learning Lab

For more information, see this project's homepage.

The project PERSONAL ROBOTIC ASSISTANTS FOR THE ELDERLY is an inter-disciplinary research initiative on Personal Service Robots for the elderly, that brings together researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.

The goal of our project is to develop mobile, personal service robots that assist elderly people suffering from chronic disorders in their everyday life. We are currently developing anautonomous mobile robot that "lives" in a private home of a chronically ill elderly person. The robot provides a research platform to test out a range of ideas for assisting elderly people, such as Intelligent reminding, Mobile manipulation, Telepresence, Data collection and surveillance, and Social interaction.

If successful, this project could change the way we deliver health-care to the ever-growing contingent of elderly people, and it could significantly advance the state-of-the-art in mobile service robotics and human robot interaction.

Name - Title <Email Address>
• [Home] Greg Armstrong - Senior Research Technician, CS <roboman@andrew.cmu.edu>
• [Home] Tsuhan Chen - Professor, ECE (Adjunct) <tsuhan@ece.cmu.edu>
• [Home] David Cohn - Research Scientist (Adjunct)
• [Home] Dieter Fox - Research Associate, CS <dfox@cs.cmu.edu>
• Sara Kiesler - Hillman Professor of CS and HCII, HCII <kiesler@cs.cmu.edu>
• John Langford - PhD Student, CS <jcl3@andrew.cmu.edu>
• Dimitris Margaritis - PhD Student, CS <dm2@andrew.cmu.edu>
• [Home] Michael Montemerlo - PhD Student, RI
• [Home] Joelle Pineau - PhD Student, RI
• [Home] Nicholas Roy - PhD Student, RI
• [Home] Hagen Schempf - Principal Systems Scientist <hagen@rec.ri.cmu.edu (Currently On Leave)>
• Jamieson Schulte - Senior Research Programmer <jschulte@cs.cmu.edu>
• [Home] Reid Simmons - Research Prof/Assoc Dir Educ/PhD Chair, RI/CS <reids@cs.cmu.edu>
• [Home] Sebastian Thrun - Adjunct Associate Professor, MLD/CSD/RI (Adjunct) <thrun@stanford.edu>
• Michael Vande Weghe - Technical Staff, ICES <vandeweg@cmu.edu>

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Policy-contingent abstraction for robust robot control
  J. Pineau, G. Gordon, and S. Thrun
  Conference on Uncertainty in Articifical Intelligence (UAI), August, 2003, pp. 477 - 484. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [279 KB], ps.gz [464 KB] copyrighted

• Towards robotic assistants in nursing homes: Challenges and results
  J. Pineau, M. Montemerlo, M. Pollack, N. Roy, and S. Thrun
  Special issue on Socially Interactive Robots, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Vol. 42, No. 3 - 4, 2003, pp. 271 - 281. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [391 KB] copyrighted

• Probabilistic control of human robot interaction: Experiments with a robotic assistant for Nursing Homes
  J. Pineau, M. Montemerlo, M. Pollack, N. Roy, and S. Thrun
  The second IARP/IEEE/RAS Joint Workshop on Technical Challenges for Robots in Human Environments (DRHE), October, 2002. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [461 KB], ps.gz [594 KB] copyrighted

• Pearl: A Mobile Robotic Assistant for the Elderly
  M. Pollack, S. Engberg, J.T. Matthews, S. Thrun, L. Brown, D. Colbry, C. Orosz, B. Peintner, S. Ramakrishnan, J. Dunbar-Jacob, C. McCarthy, M. Montemerlo, J. Pineau, and N. Roy
  Workshop on Automation as Caregiver: the Role of Intelligent Technology in Elder Care (AAAI), August, 2002.