CARE: Cooperation of AI-Robot Enablers to Create a Vibrant Society

Demographic changes in our society are putting a heavy burden on care facilities and healthcare infrastructure. While the elderly population is steadily increasing, there is an acute shortage of caregiving experts and professionals. This problem is becoming more severe in super-ageing societies, namely Japan. Hence, this urges new and practical solutions to welfare facilities to mitigate the burden on caregivers and human supporting partners by introducing robotics assistance through information and communication technology (ICT). In this work, we present a new multi-robot cooperation and coordination framework at different intellectual computation levels for care facilities. The framework is developed to have the healthcare 4.0 concept one step closer to reality under the ongoing project “Moonshot R & D” in Japan. Firstly we present an Internet of Things (IoT) integration system that is designed to include different passive and active assistive robots. Then, we re-design robot systems and develop a semi-autonomous plat- form that can perform tasks based on user/patient interaction in real-world care facility scenarios. Our framework provides human-robot interaction under shared autonomy between the user and assisting robots to improve the efficacy of the users in everyday tasks. Tohoku University’s new state-of-the-art living lab facility is used to prepare a real-world scenario where we present our experimental results. We also discuss the open problems in future care and human assistance aspects.