A domestic research team has developed and released artificial intelligence robot technology that assists people with their daily activities. By activating research on robot artificial intelligence, it is expected to be of great help in commercializing services that help solve social problems such as aging and individualization.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced that it has developed a robot artificial intelligence technology that understands the elderly, responds emotionally, and provides personalized services tailored to the situation.

This technology is a total of 13 robot artificial intelligence technologies, including: △technology to recognize the daily behavior of the elderly; △technology to recognize the external features of the elderly such as facial features and clothing style; △technology to recognize the belongings of the elderly; △technology to have the robot generate its own interaction behavior with the elderly; and △voice recognition technology specialized for the elderly.

These technologies can be used to provide a variety of robotic services for the elderly.

For example, it can provide a variety of communication options, such as checking whether the patient has taken their medication at the scheduled time, correcting their posture while exercising together, or showing them where they have placed items like remote controls.

The research team verified the performance and stability of this technology in various home environments with a large number of elderly people.

Since September of this year, the research team has been verifying the technology by placing robots equipped with the research team's technology in two homes where grandmothers actually live in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, and having them live with the homes for two months.

Additionally, starting in October of this year, the Icheon Senior Citizens' Welfare Center in Gyeonggi Province will provide useful robot services such as information provision, welfare center guidance, conversation services, and memory assistance to 100 senior citizens.

We are also continuing to conduct a live lab in an apartment complex in Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, and conducting a pilot study with 40 senior citizens.

This is the first time in the world that researchers have verified the performance of a robot based on technology and data specialized for the elderly and safely conducted large-scale, long-term testing.

ETRI is specialized in robot environment for elderly behavior recognition We have been conducting research since 2017 to gather data.

In particular, since 2018, we have been collaborating with the Comprehensive Support Center for Senior Citizens Living Alone to build a large-scale complex dataset necessary for robot artificial intelligence research and to disclose related technologies.

To date, the research team has released the world's largest 3D image data set and technologies for research on robots for elderly care, including a 3D image dataset for recognizing the daily behavior of the elderly, a dataset for recognizing the voices of the elderly, and a dataset for automatically generating robot speech gestures.

The large-scale, high-quality dataset obtained through the research team's efforts is currently being utilized in various ways, including through agreements with 55 domestic and 43 overseas research institutions.

The disclosed technology and data can be found on the project website (https://ai4robot.github.io/). Access is free for research and academic purposes. For commercial use, the relevant technology can be transferred through negotiation.

The research team's technology won the grand prize among the top 10 representative achievements of ETRI in 2020, and was also selected as one of 24 excellent research achievements of government-funded research institutes in the field of science and technology in 2020 announced by the National Research Council for Science and Technology (NST), and was widely recognized for its excellence, including receiving the Minister of Science and ICT Award in May of this year.

Kim Jae-hong, head of the ETRI Human-Robot Interaction Lab, said, "We've secured our technological prowess through a process of repeatedly identifying and addressing unexpected issues through large-scale, long-term demonstrations. We hope this technology will contribute to the development of robot services that can provide practical assistance to seniors."