Abstract
Mobility represents very basic and essential behavior for people: reaching a destination, strolling at will, and much more. Indispensable for independence, it also makes life more enjoyable. Yet moving from place to place may be difficult for disabled, elderly, or ill individuals affected by an impairment of sight, hearing, or lower-extremity motor function, which undermine abilities needed for mobility: recognizing things, controlling motor function, and accessing information. To offset this, countries and communities have been actively preparing systems and facilities in recent years to make routes barrier-free. But it would be unfeasible to make all routes barrier-free, and there continues to be a great need for mobility support with IT technology as an alternative means of assistance. We have been researching to put Robotic Communication Terminals (RCT) into practice, which supports the three elementary behaviors of recognition, actuation, and information access, targeting almost all the pedestrians including elderly and disabled people with various types, levels, and duration of disabilities. The RCT consists of three types of terminals: “environment-embedded terminal”, “user-carried mobile terminal”, and “user-carrying mobile terminal”. These terminals communicate with one another to provide the users with a comfortable means of mobility. This paper introduces our recent research progress.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Yairi, I.E., Igi, S.: A Mobility Support System Assisting the Elderly and the Disabled by Connecting the Real-world, Computer Networks, and Users. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Mobile Multimedia Communications, 3B-3, pp. 1–6 (2000)
Yairi, I.E., Igi, S.: Robotic Communication Terminals as a Mobility Support System for Elderly and Disabled People(3) (in Japanese). Trans. of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence 18(1), 29–35 (2003)
Igi, S., Tamaru, M., Yamamoto, Y., Ujitani, M., Sugita, S.: Sign Language Synthesis for the Mobile Environments. In: Proceedings of WSCG 2003, Plzen, Czech Republic, February (2003)
Oyama, S., Yairi, I.E., Igi, S., Nishimura, T.: Walking Support Using Compact Terminals with Infrared Audio Communication. In: Miesenberger, K., Klaus, J., Zagler, W., Burger, D. (eds.) ICCHP 2004. LNCS, vol. 3118, pp. 468–475. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Kayama, K., Yairi, I.E., Igi, S.: Construction of Elevation Map for User- Carried Outdoor Mobile Robot using Stereo Vision. In: Proceeding of 2003 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Washington D.C., USA, Oct. 2003, pp. 4631–4636. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2003)
Yairi, I.E., Yairi, T., Igi, S.: Intention Recognition for Vehicle Driving by Sensing of User and Environment. In: Applied Informatics 2003: The 21st IASTED International Multi-Conference on Applied Informatics (AI 2003), Innsbruck, Austria, February 10-13, pp. 166–171 (2003)
Kayama, K., Yairi, I.E., Igi, S.: Road Observation System for Robotic Communication Terminals supporting Pedestrians. In: proceedings of the IEEE 5th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Vol.1, No.O6-4, pp.635–640 (2002)
Yairi, I.E., Yoshioka, H., et al.: Mobility Support GIS with Route Accessibility Information for Pedestrians (in Japanese). Trans. of Human Interface Society 5(4), 413–420 (2003)
Yairi, I.E., Igi, S.: Accessible Route and Area Information Support GIS for All Pedestrians Including the Elderly and the Disabled. In: Proceedings of 11th World Congress on ITS, Nagoya, Japan, October 18-24 (2004)
http://bfms.nict.go.jp/koganei/index.html (in Japanese)
http://bfms.nict.go.jp/kyoto/index.html (in Japanese)
http://www.meti.go.jp/information/data/c30319aj.html (in Japanese)
http://www.jiritsu-project.jp/ (in Japanese)
Golledge, R.G., Klatzky, R.L., et al.: A geographical information system for a GPS based personal guidance system. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 12(7), 727–749 (1998)
Hatakeyama, T., Hagiwara, F., et al.: Remote Infrared Audible Signage System. International Journal of Human-computer interaction 17(1), 61–70 (2004)
van Veen, H.A.H.C., Distler, H.K., et al.: Navigating through a virtual city: Using virtual reality technology to study human action and perception. Future Generation Computer Systems 14, 231–242 (1998)
Rieser, J.J., Hill, E.W., Talor, C.R., Bradfield, A., Rosen, S.: Visual experience, visual field size, and the development of nonvisual sensitivity to the spatial structure of outdoor neighborhoods explored by walking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 121(2), 210–221 (1992)
Prassler, E., Scholz, J., Fiorini, P.: A Robotic Wheelchair for Crowded Public Environments. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine 8(1), 38–45 (2001)
Shoval, S., Ulrich, I., Borenstein, J.: NavBelt and the GuideCane. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine 10(1), 9–20 (2003)
Ogawa, T., Tsukamoto, M.: Tools for Constructing Pseudo-3D Space on the WWW using Images. New Generation Computing 18(4), 391–407 (2000)
Argyros, A., Georgiadis, P., et al.: Semi-autonomous Navigation of a Robotic Wheelchair. J. of Intelligent and Robotic Systems 34(3), 315–329 (2002)
http://www.meti.go.jp/information/downloadfiles/c30319b04j_OnlinePDF.pdf (in Japanese)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Yairi, I.E., Kayama, K., Igi, S. (2007). Robotic Communication Terminals as a Ubiquitous System for Improving Human Mobility by Making Environment Virtually Barrier-Free. In: Sakurai, A., Hasida, K., Nitta, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI JSAI 2003 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3609. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71009-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71009-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71008-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-71009-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)