Intelligent Space as a Platform for Human Observation

In the recent years, the needs for physical support such as release from household work, care for the elderly people and so on are rising. Therefore, researches on robots for daily life are being pursued actively. However, highly dynamic and complicated living environments make it difficult to operate mobile robots. In order to solve this problem, it is important to design the environment for mobile robots as well as making mobile robots intelligent to adapt to it. But environmental design in the living space is limited because it should not have a big influence on human lives. We also have to consider how to deal with the dynamic environment. So, it is not enough just to apply a passive approach (e.g. elimination of difference in level on the floor, installation of markers on the wall and so on). Moreover, to provide appropriate service to the human according to the circumstances, mobile robots have to understand the request from human based on observation. The information extracted from observation of humans can also be used for the action of mobile robots because humans are expected to be producing intelligent reactions when confronted with various situations. However, it is not practical that a mobile robot keeps on observing humans while doing other tasks. In addition, owing to restrictions of the capability of mounted sensors and computers, it is difficult to observe humans using on-board sensors. In order to realize this, we utilize “Intelligent Space (iSpace)” where many intelligent devices are distributed. (Lee & Hashimoto, 2002). Such an environment is referred as smart environment, smart space, intelligent environment and so on. The smart environments observe the space using distributed sensors, extract useful information from the obtained data and provide various services to users. This means their essential functions are “observation,” “understanding” and “actuation.” The research field on smart environment has been expanding recently (Cook & Das, 2004) and, under the concept of ubiquitous computing, many researchers have developed smart environments for providing informative services to the users (e.g. support during meeting (Johanson, et al., 2002), health care (Nishida et al., 2000), support of the elderly (Mynatt et al., 2004), information display using a pan-tilt projector (Mori et al., 2004)). On the other hand, smart environments are also used for support of mobile robots. Kurabayashi et al. (Kurabayashi et al., 2002) evaluated an efficiency of multi-robot transportation task when the route to the goal is selected by individual mobile robots and by a smart environment (or