MOnarCH - Multi-Robot Cognitive Systems Operating in Hospitals

The focus of the MOnarCH project is on social robotics using networked heterogeneous  robots and  sensors  to  interact  with  children,  staff,  and visitors, engaging in edutainment activities in the pediatric infirmary at the Portuguese Oncology Institute at Lisbon (IPOL), Portugal. 

Besides being a realistic scenario, the ethical regulations enforced by IPOL for the pediatric ward introduce important constraints on the use of some technologies, representing a challenging research opportunity. Moreover, it  is  an  environment  where  socially  admissible  interactions can  be  well framed and implemented within current state of the art technologies. 

MOnarCH  targets  (i)  the  development  of  a  novel  framework  to  model mixed human-robot societies, and (ii) its demonstration using a network of heterogeneous robots and sensors, in the pediatric area of an oncological hospital.  The  robots  will  engage  in  edutainment  activities and  the uncertainties  introduced  by  people  and  robots  themselves  shall  be handled to yield natural interactions. 

Innovation  is  expected  mainly  in  (i)  the  modeling  and  analysis  of  the dynamics  of  social organizations,  and  social  individuals,  (ii)  the  mapping between  such  models  and implementable  systems,  (iii)  the  integration between  models  related  to  social  and  asocial behaviors,  (iv)  the introduction  of  creative  methods  of  interaction  between  people  and robots,  based  on  models  of  the  dynamics  of  social  organizations  and individuals, and (v) the adaptation of robots to individuals and groups of people.