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The global increase in the elderly population necessitates innovative long-term care solutions to improve the quality of life for vulnerable individuals while reducing caregiver burdens. Assistive robots, leveraging advancements in Machine Learning, offer promising personalised support. However, their integration into daily life raises significant privacy concerns. Widely used frameworks like the Robot Operating System (ROS) historically lack inherent privacy mechanisms, complicating data-driven approaches in robotics. This research pioneers user-centric, privacy-aware technologies such as Federated Learning (FL) to advance assistive robotics. FL enables collaborative learning without sharing sensitive data, addressing privacy and scalability issues. This work includes developing solutions for smart wheelchair assistance, enhancing user independence and well-being. By tackling challenges related to non-stationary data and heterogeneous environments, the research aims to improve personalisation and user experience. Ultimately, it seeks to lead the responsible integration of assistive robots into society, enhancing the quality of life for elderly and care-dependent individuals., Comment: RSS Pioneers 2024 Research Statement

Federated Learning is a novel framework that allows multiple devices or institutions to train a machine learning model collaboratively while preserving their data private. This decentralized approach is prone to suffer the consequences of data statistical heterogeneity, both across the different entities and over time, which may lead to a lack of convergence. To avoid such issues, different methods have been proposed in the past few years. However, data may be heterogeneous in lots of different ways, and current proposals do not always determine the kind of heterogeneity they are considering. In this work, we formally classify data statistical heterogeneity and review the most remarkable learning strategies that are able to face it. At the same time, we introduce approaches from other machine learning frameworks, such as Continual Learning, that also deal with data heterogeneity and could be easily adapted to the Federated Learning settings., Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures

Smart devices, such as smartphones, wearables, robots, and others, can collect vast amounts of data from their environment. This data is suitable for training machine learning models, which can significantly improve their behavior, and therefore, the user experience. Federated learning is a young and popular framework that allows multiple distributed devices to train deep learning models collaboratively while preserving data privacy. Nevertheless, this approach may not be optimal for scenarios where data distribution is non-identical among the participants or changes over time, causing what is known as concept drift. Little research has yet been done in this field, but this kind of situation is quite frequent in real life and poses new challenges to both continual and federated learning. Therefore, in this work, we present a new method, called Concept-Drift-Aware Federated Averaging (CDA-FedAvg). Our proposal is an extension of the most popular federated algorithm, Federated Averaging (FedAvg), enhancing it for continual adaptation under concept drift. We empirically demonstrate the weaknesses of regular FedAvg and prove that CDA-FedAvg outperforms it in this type of scenario.

Today we live in a context in which devices are increasingly interconnected and sensorized and are almost ubiquitous. Deep learning has become in recent years a popular way to extract knowledge from the huge amount of data that these devices are able to collect. Nevertheless, centralized state-of-the-art learning methods have a number of drawbacks when facing real distributed problems, in which the available information is usually private, partial, biased and evolving over time. Federated learning is a popular framework that allows multiple distributed devices to train models remotely, collaboratively, and preserving data privacy. However, the current proposals in federated learning focus on deep architectures that in many cases are not feasible to implement in non-dedicated devices such as smartphones. Also, little research has been done regarding the scenario where data distribution changes over time in unforeseen ways, causing what is known as concept drift. Therefore, in this work we want to present Light Federated and Continual Consensus (LFedCon2), a new federated and continual architecture that uses light, traditional learners. Our method allows powerless devices (such as smartphones or robots) to learn in real time, locally, continuously, autonomously and from users, but also improving models globally, in the cloud, combining what is learned locally, in the devices. In order to test our proposal, we have applied it in a heterogeneous community of smartphone users to solve the problem of walking recognition. The results show the advantages that LFedCon2 provides with respect to other state-of-the-art methods., Comment: 28 pages, 10 figures