Improving Social Interaction and Cognition for Assistive and Personal Robotics

Consequential Robotics (CQR) is a new start-up founded to “enhance the experience of later life” by melding inspirational British design with state-of-the-art robotics. In fifteen years there will 50% more over 65s than there are today, and the proportion of older people in our society will continue to grow for some time after that. Robotic systems can help mitigate some of the most significant effects of this changing demographic. Specifically, a new generation of safe and human-friendly devices could assist in enabling independence of older citizens in their own homes. Current robots lack an integrated capability to recognise, and adapt their behaviour to, individual users. We aim to significantly improve the interaction abilities of assistive devices through advances to the state-of-the-art in the fields of person perception and human action recognition. We will to demonstrate this in the form of an animal-like robot companion, designed to provide social, assistive and therapeutic benefits for end users.