Human-centered manipulation and navigation with Robot DE NIRO
This work addresses the need for social assistance robots to support caregivers and care recipients in elderly care, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing robotics research with a focus on human-centered design.
The paper introduces Robot DE NIRO, a research platform designed to assist caregivers and interact with care recipients in health and elderly care settings, capable of complex manipulation tasks, reliable human interaction, and autonomous navigation in dynamic environments.
Social assistance robots in health and elderly care have the potential to support and ease human lives. Given the macrosocial trends of aging and long-lived populations, robotics-based care research mainly focused on helping the elderly live independently. In this paper, we introduce Robot DE NIRO, a research platform that aims to support the supporter (the caregiver) and also offers direct human-robot interaction for the care recipient. Augmented by several sensors, DE NIRO is capable of complex manipulation tasks. It reliably interacts with humans and can autonomously and swiftly navigate through dynamically changing environments. We describe preliminary experiments in a demonstrative scenario and discuss DE NIRO's design and capabilities. We put particular emphases on safe, human-centered interaction procedures implemented in both hardware and software, including collision avoidance in manipulation and navigation as well as an intuitive perception stack through speech and face recognition.