MetraLabs (Germany)

This paper presents results of the development of a socially assistive home robot companion for older people suffering from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and living (alone) at home. This work was part of the European FP7 project “CompanionAble” (2008-2012) [1] which aimed at developing assistive technologies that can support these elderly and help them to remain in their familiar living environment for as long as possible. To overcome current market entry barriers, from the start we consistently adopted a user- and application-centered development process of the companion robot and focused on three main aspects: (i) the realization of a set of mandatory functionalities to support care recipients and caregivers, (ii) a strict design and usability driven realization to increase the acceptance of the robot by the different end-user groups (the elderly, their relatives, and caregivers), and (iii) the development and component selection considering production and operational costs. In continuation of the work presented in [2], this paper describes the final implementation of the companion robot and presents latest results of functional tests and early findings of user studies recently conducted in the smart house of the Dutch project partner Smart Homes in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

The growing field of mobile robotics produces various types of robot systems for different applications. However, the development of new robots often requires the design of new hardware systems which is time consuming and susceptible to errors. Here, we present a modular and highly flexible hardware architecture that allows to simplify the adaptation of the robot to a new task and reduces the time for the development of a new robot system. This hardware architecture was developed according to industrial standards and is applicable to industrial and to research mobile robot systems. This paper describes the underlying demands to the hardware, the technical solutions and the designed modules. Moreover, we show the successful integration of the new architecture in three different robot systems (indoor and outdoor).