In recent years, with the current advancements in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), robots have the potential to support the field of healthcare. Robotic systems are often introduced in the care of the elderly, children, and persons with disabilities, in hospitals, in rehabilitation and walking assistance, and other healthcare situations. In this survey paper, the recent advances in robotic technology applied in the healthcare domain are discussed. The paper provides detailed information about state-of-the-art research in care, hospital, assistive, rehabilitation, and walking assisting robots. The paper also discusses the open challenges healthcare robots face to be integrated into our society.

Statistical Dialogue Systems (SDS) have proved their humongous potential over the past few years. However, the lack of efficient and robust representations of the belief state (BS) space refrains them from revealing their full potential. There is a great need for automatic BS representations, which will replace the old hand-crafted, variable-length ones. To tackle those problems, we introduce a novel use of Autoencoders (AEs). Our goal is to obtain a low-dimensional, fixed-length, and compact, yet robust representation of the BS space. We investigate the use of dense AE, Denoising AE (DAE) and Variational Denoising AE (VDAE), which we combine with GP-SARSA to learn dialogue policies in the PyDial toolkit. In this framework, the BS is normally represented in a relatively compact, but still redundant summary space which is obtained through a heuristic mapping of the original master space. We show that all the proposed AE-based representations consistently outperform the summary BS representation. Especially, as the Semantic Error Rate (SER) increases, the DAE/VDAE-based representations obtain state-of-the-art and sample efficient performance.

The use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches for dialogue policy optimization has been the new trend for dialogue management systems. Several methods have been proposed, which are trained on dialogue data to provide optimal system response. However, most of these approaches exhibit performance degradation in the presence of noise, poor scalability to other domains, as well as performance instabilities. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel approach based on the incremental, sample-efficient Least-Squares Policy Iteration (LSPI) algorithm, which is trained on compact, fixed-size dialogue state encodings, obtained from deep Variational Denoising Autoencoders (VDAE). The proposed scheme exhibits stable and noise-robust performance, which significantly outperforms the current state-of-theart, even in mismatched noise environments.

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