Abstract: The current demographic statistics and projections indicate that the increase of life expectancy and the reduction in births are increasing the percentage of the population 65+ and inevitably impacting the social and economic balance of society. The advances and continuous convergence of mobile, cloud, communication, electronic, artificial intelligence and interacting technologies can significantly extend the possibility to augment the human physical and cognitive capabilities of elderly persons and carers thus allowing to re-think new models of integrated care that may contribute to the economical and societal sustainability of health and care systems. Furthermore, these technologies are the basis for providing services and systems that may help to improve quality of life, stay healthier, live independently, and manage any reduced capabilities related to the ageing with a proactive and patient-centred approach. The rise of mobile technology, the wireless communication, the rapid growing of internet services and resources and the wide penetration of smartphones and tablets make concrete the idea to connect robots to internet and to the Cloud, thus defining a new paradigm for robotics and automation from standalone and networked robotics to cloud robotics. Recently the cloud robotic paradigm extended the concept of networked robotics and, as a matter of fact, the Internet, the vast computational resources and the storage capacity have the potential to define a new paradigm with significant benefits for robotics and automation. In this context, Cloud Service Robotics could be defined as the integration of different agents that allow an efficient, effective and robust cooperation between robots, smart environments and humans, to provide continuous services to senior citizens. CSR could be applied in many robotic applications, enabling robots to offload CPU-heavy tasks and access base knowledge to expand robot consciousness beyond their physical body. In this presentation, the case study of the Robot-Era system is presented and the related Cloud Robotics challenges are discussed. The Robot-Era case study is characterized of a number of services for assisted living, provided by a plurality of complete advanced robotic systems, integrated in intelligent indoor and outdoor environments. The Robot-Era architecture integrates a multi-robot system able to work in different environments such as outdoors, condominium and homes. It also includes Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), constituting the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) infrastructure that supervises the environments and localizes the user. Other agents of the system include the elevator and the user interfaces (i.e., tablet and microphone). In addition, this presentation shows the experience gained in design, developing and testing the Robot-Era system, for which, firstly, a dependability model was used to confirm technical specifications and, secondly, an acceptability model was used to evaluate the human-oriented features. Particularly, it will be demonstrated the importance of an innovative methodology for metrics and benchmarks that includes not only the main technical attributes of dependability, but also the parameters of acceptability, both implemented by using a user centred design and co-creative approach. 

Biography: Filippo Cavallo, MScEE, Phd in Bioengineering, is Assistant Professor at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, (Pisa, Italy), focusing on cloud and social robotics, ambient assisted living, wireless and wearable sensor systems, biomedical processing, acceptability and ICT and AAL roadmapping. He participated in various National and European projects and currently is project manager of Robot-Era, AALIANCE2 and Parkinson Project. He was visiting researcher at the the EndoCAS Center of Excellence, Pisa, Italy working in Computer Assisted Surgery (2005-2007); at the Takanishi Lab, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan working on wireless sensor network (2007); at Tecnalia Recerch Center, Basque Country, Spain working on wearable sensor system for AAL. He was granted from the International Symposium of Robotics Research Committee as Fellowship Winner for best PhD thesis in Robotics (2007); from the Regional POR FSE 2007-2013 for a 3-years Research position at The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pontedera, Italy (2010-2013); from the ACCESS-IT 2009 for the Good Practise Label in Alzheimer Project (2009); from the Well-Tech Award for Quality of Life with the Robot-Era Project (2014); from the SMAU Award for Quality of Life with the Robot-Era Project (2014). He is author of various papers on conferences and ISI journals.