RAPP · RAPP– Robotic Applications for Delivering Smart User Empowering Applications

As our societies are affected by a dramatic demographic change, in the near future elderly and people requiring support in their daily life will increase and caregivers will not be enough to assist and support them. Socially interactive robots can help to confront this situation not only by physically assisting people but also functioning as a companion. The increasing sales figures of robots are pointing that we are in front of a trend break for robotics. To lower the cost for developers and to increase their interest on developing robotic applications, the RAPP introduces the idea of robots as platforms.<br/>RAPP (Robotic Applications for Delivering Smart User Empowering Applications) will provide a software platform in order to support the creation and delivery of robotics applications (RAPPs) targeted to people at risk of exclusion, especially older people. The open-source software platform will provide an API that contains the functionalities for implementing RAPPs and accessing the robot's sensors and actuators using higher level commands, by adding a middleware stack with added functionalities suitable for different kinds of robots. RAPP will expand the computational and storage capabilities of robots and enable machine learning operations, distributed data collection and processing, and knowledge sharing among robots in order to provide personalized applications based on adaptation to individuals. The use of a common API will assist developers is creating improved applications for different types of robots that target to people with different needs, capabilities and expectations, while at the same time respect their privacy and autonomy, thus the proposed RAPP Store will have a profound effect in the robotic application market. The results of RAPP will be evaluated through the development and benchmarking of social assistive RAPPs, which exploit the innovative features (RAPP API, RAPP Store, knowledge reuse, etc.) introduced by the proposed paradigm.