While increasing demand of the service for the disabled and the elderly people, assistive technologies have been developed rapidly. The natural signal of human such as voice or gesture has been applied to the system for assisting the disabled and the elderly people. As an example of such kind of human robot interface, the Soft Remote Control System has been developed by HWRS-ERC in KAIST[1]. This system is a vision-based hand gesture recognition system for controlling home appliances such as television, lamp and curtain. One of the most important technologies of the system is the hand gesture recognition algorithm. The frequently occurred problems which lower the recognition rate of hand gesture are inter-person variation and intra-person variation. Intra-person variation can be handled by inducing fuzzy concept. In this paper, we propose multivariate fuzzy decision tree(MFDT) learning and classification algorithm for hand motion recognition. To recognize hand gesture of a new user, the most proper recognition model among several well trained models is selected using model selection algorithm and incrementally adapted to the user’s hand gesture. For the general performance of MFDT as a classifier, we show classification rate using the benchmark data of the UCI repository. For the performance of hand gesture recognition, we tested using hand gesture data which is collected from 10 people for 15 days. The experimental results show that the classification and user adaptation performance of proposed algorithm is better than general fuzzy decision tree.

This paper presents a task planning system for a steward robot, which has been developed as an interactive intermediate agent between an end-user and a complex smart home environment called the ISH(Intelligent Sweet Home) at KAIST(Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). The ISH is a large-scale robotic environment with various assistive robots and home appliances for independent living of the elderly and the people with disabilities. In particular, as an approach for achieving human-friendly human-robot interaction, we aim at 'simplification of task commands' by the user. In this sense, a task planning system has been proposed to generate a sequence of actions effectively for coordinating subtasks of the target subsystems from the given high-level task command. Basically, the task planning i s performed under the framework of STRIPS(Standard Research Institute Problem Solver) representation and the split planning method. In addition, we applied a state-partitioning technique to the backward split planning method to reduce computational time. By analyzing the obtained graph, the planning system decomposes an original planning problem into several independent sub-problems, and then, the planning system generates a proper sequence of actions. To show the effectiveness of the proposed system, we deal with a scenario of a planning problem in the ISH.

In this paper, we propose a methodology for classfying types of lower limb disability and their mechanical structure, based on extensive survey of previous developments. We also propose a task-oriented design with human-friendly and energy-efficient assistive system. The result can be used for optimal design of wearable walking-assistive robot donsidering the type of disability and the content of task.