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Probo, a friend for life? Host Publication: Brave New Interfaces - Crosstalks Authors: K. Goris, S. Yilmazyildiz, J. Saldien, B. Verrelst, D. Lefeber and W. Verhelst Publisher: ASP-VUB Press Publication Year: 2007 Number of Pages: 21 ISBN: 978-90-5487-416-4
Abstract: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is
out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth".
These were the famous words of President John F. Kennedy on May 25th 1961 to
announce a spectacular financial boost given to the space industry and realize an
American dream. And now, the year 2006, people are actually living in the international
space station while robots are exploring the Mars surface. All great changes and scientific
breakthroughs required a dared vision on the future and persistent believe in
technological ingenuity.
A dream alike is shared today in the robotics community to develop a personal
autonomous humanoid robot. Imagine a robot whose legged structure is perfectly adapted
to the human environment and which is able to walk around and perform some standard
household duties, relieving its owners even from the task of instructing him to attend
these duties. It welcomes all the family members coming home while recognizing their
face and responding to specific inflections in their voices. It will react in an adapted way
depending on their mood and emotional state by focusing on facial expressions and
specific voice patterns. The humanoid house pal stores personal information of each
family member and even tracks their daily schedule to support them as a highly
sophisticated personal assistant. This intelligent, skillful and versatile machine will not
only coordinate many of our annoying administrative tasks, guard the house, and so on,
but will become in a sense an artificial social family partner.
In Belgium alone some 300.000 children are hospitalized for long periods of time or
suffer from chronic diseases [22]. These children have a strong need to be distracted from
the scary and at the same time boring hospital live by e.g. getting in contact with their
family and friends. Furthermore, they have specific need for adapted information about
their illness, the hospital... and in general they require a lot of moral support. Different
projects exist which aim to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) like
Internet and webcams to allow these children to stay in contact with their parents, to
virtually attend lectures at their school, etc. [22], [23]. Probo addresses both the
information and communication aspects and the need for support and companionship of
hospitalized children [24]. External Link.
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