A platform-independent robot control architecture for multiple therapeutic scenarios
This work addresses the need for reusable robot control in therapeutic settings, but it is incremental as it builds on existing architectures without specifying major breakthroughs.
The authors tackled the problem of social robots having pre-programmed, non-reusable behaviors by proposing a platform-independent control architecture that can be applied across multiple therapeutic scenarios, enabling reutilization on various social robot platforms.
While social robots are developed to provide assistance to users through social interactions, their behaviors are dominantly pre-programmed and remote-controlled. Despite the numerous robot control architectures being developed, very few offer reutilization opportunities in various therapeutic contexts. To bridge this gap, we propose a robot control architecture to be applied in different scenarios taking into account requirements from both therapeutic and robotic perspectives. As robot behaviors are kept at an abstract level and afterward mapped with the robot's morphology, the proposed architecture accommodates its applicability to a variety of social robot platforms.