There are widely acknowledged imperatives for helping the elderly live at home - independently for as long as possible. Without cognitive stimulation support the elderly dementia and depression sufferers can deteriorate rapidly and the carers ill face a more demanding task. Both groups are increasingly at the risk of social exclusion.
The FP7 Integrated Project CompanionAble will provide the synergy of Robotics and Ambient Intelligence technologies and their integration to provide for a care-giver's assistive environment. This will support the cognitive stimulation and therapy management of the care-recipient. This is mediated by a robotic companion (mobile facilitation) working collaboratively with a smart home environment (stationary facilitation).Positive effects of both individual solutions shall be combined to demonstrate how the synergy between a stationary smart home solution and an embodied mobile robot companion can make the care and the care-recipient’s interaction with her assistive system significantly better.
Starting with a profound requirements engineering for ICT-supported care and therapy management for the care-recipients, basic technologies for multimodal user observation and human-machine interaction will provide the fundamentals for the development of a stationary smart home assistive system and a mobile robot assistant, building the cornerstones of the overall system integrating the promising solutions of both parts.
After the realization of the respective scenarios, field trials will be carried out in care centers and home environments to evaluate and test the system. This way both scenarios can be evaluated to show their strengths and weaknesses. This will initiate the development of an overall, integrated care scenario (smart home with embedded robot companion).

Press releases

AAL: TU Ilmenau und MetraLabs forschen in EU-Projekt "CompanionAble", 15.01.2009

Pictures of the Future, Herbst 2010, S. 98 - 100, "Digitale Butler"

EHEALTHCOM, Heft 1/2011, S 14-19, "Pflege 2050"

Publications

2012

Merten, M., Bley, A., Schröter, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
A mobile robot platform for socially assistive home-care applications.
in: Proc. 7th German Conference on Robotics, 2012, Munich, Germany, pp. 233-238, 2012

2011

Einhorn, E., Schröter, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
Attention-Driven Monocular Scene Reconstruction for Obstacle Detection, Robot Navigation and Map Building. 
in: Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 59 (2011) 5, 296-309, Elsevier 

Einhorn, E., Schröter, Ch. and Gross, H.-M.
Finding the Adequate Resolution for Grid Mapping - Cell Sizes Locally Adapting On-the-Fly.
in: Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2011), Shanghai, China, pp. 1843-1848 

Einhorn, E., Schröter, C., Gross, H.-M.
Monocular Detection and Estimation of Moving Obstacles for Robot Navigation.
in: Proc. 5th European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR 2011), Orebro, Sweden, pp. 121-126 

Gross, H.-M., Schröter, Ch., Müller, S., Volkhardt, M., Einhorn, E., Bley, A., Martin, Ch., Langner, T., Merten, M.
Progress in Developing a Socially Assistive Mobile Home Robot Companion for the Elderly with Mild Cognitive Impairment.
in: Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2011), San Francisco, USA, pp. 2430-2437, IEEE Omnipress 2011 

Gross, H.-M., Schröter, Ch., Müller, S., Volkhardt, M., Einhorn, E., Bley, A., Martin, Ch., Langner, T., Merten, M.
I'll keep an Eye on You: Home Robot Companion for Elderly People with Cognitive Impairment.
in: IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (IEEE-SMC 2011), Anchorage, USA, pp. 2481-2488, IEEE 2011 

Volkhardt, M., Müller, S., Schröter, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
Detection of Lounging People with a Mobile Robot Companion.
in: Proc. 2011 International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA 2011), Aachen, Germany, LNAI 7102, pp. 328-337, Springer 2011 

Volkhardt, M., Müller, S., Schröter, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
Playing Hide and Seek with a Mobile Companion Robot.
in: Proc. 11th IEEE-RAS Int. Conf. on Humanoid Robots 2011 (Humanoids 2011), Bled, Slovenia, pp. 40-46 

2010

Einhorn, E., Schröter, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
Can't Take my Eye off You: Attention-Driven Monocular Obstacle Detection and 3D Mapping.
in: Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2010), Taipeh, Taiwan, pp. 816-821, IEEE 2010 

Einhorn, E., Schröter, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
Building 2D and 3D Adaptive-Resolution Occupancy Maps using Nd-Trees.
in: Proc. 55th Int. Scientific Colloquium, Ilmenau, Germany, 2010, pp. 306-311, Verlag ISLE 2010 

Kessler, J., Gaudig, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
What is different? - Modeling the Changeability of the Environment.
in: Proc. 55th Int. Scientific Colloquium, Ilmenau, Germany, 2010, pp. 294-299, Verlag ISLE 2010 

Müller, St., Schröter, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
Aspects of User Specific Dialog Adaptation for an Autonomous Robot.
in: Proc. 55th Int. Scientific Colloquium, Ilmenau, Germany, 2010, pp. 635-640, Verlag ISLE 2010 

Stricker, R., Hommel, S., Martin, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
Realtime User Attention and Emotion Estimation on a Mobile Robot.
in: Proc. 55th Int. Scientific Colloquium, Ilmenau, Germany, 2010, pp. 629-634, Verlag ISLE 2010 

Volkhardt, M., Müller, St., Schröter, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
Real-time Activity Recognition on a Mobile Companion Robot.
in: Proc. 55th Int. Scientific Colloquium, Ilmenau, Germany, 2010, pp. 612-617, Verlag ISLE 2010 

Weinrich, Ch., Müller, St., Gross, H.-M.
Appearance-based Person Tracking and 3D Pose Estimation of Upper-Body and Head.
in: Proc. 55th Int. Scientific Colloquium, Ilmenau, Germany, 2010, pp. 606-611, Verlag ISLE 2010 

2009

Kessler, J., König, A., Gross, H.-M.
An Improved Sensor Model on Appearance Based SLAM.
in: Proc. Autonomous Mobile Systems (AMS 2009), Karlsruhe, Germany, pp. 153-160, Informatik Aktuell, Springer 2009 

Schröter, Ch., Höchemer, M., Müller, St., Gross, H.-M.
Autonomous Robot Cameraman - Observation Pose Optimization for a Mobile Service Robot in Indoor Living Space.
in: Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2009), Kobe, Japan, pp. 424-429, Omnipress 2009 

Stricker, R., Martin, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
Increasing the Robustness of 2D Active Appearance Models for Real-World Applications.
in: Proc. 7th Int. Conf. on Computer Vision Systems (ICVS 2009), Liege, LNCS 5815, pp. 364-373, Springer 2009 

2008

Martin, Ch., Gross, H.-M.
A Real-time Facial Expression Recognition System based on Active Appearance Models using Gray Images and Edge Images.
in: Proc. of the 8th IEEE Int. Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition (FG'08), Amsterdam, paper no. 299, 6 pages, IEEE

Müller, St., Hellbach, S., Schaffernicht, E., Ober, A., Scheidig, A., Gross, H.-M.
Whom to talk to? Estimating user interest from movement trajectories.
in: Proc. of the 17th IEEE Int. Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, (RO-MAN 08), Munich, Germany, pp. 532-538, IEEE Omnipress