MobiKa - Low-Cost Mobile Robot for Human-Robot Interaction
This addresses the need for affordable assistive robots for elderly care, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing HRI concepts.
The researchers tackled the problem of supporting elderly people at home by designing and evaluating a low-cost mobile robot for communication, which was tested in a real-life elderly care home scenario.
One way to allow elderly people to stay longer in their homes is to use of service robots to support them with everyday tasks. With this goal, we design, develop and evaluate a low-cost mobile robot to communicate with elderly people. The main idea is to create an affordable communication assistant robot which is optimized for multimodal Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Our robot can navigate autonomously through dynamic environments using a new algorithm to calculate poses for approaching persons. The robot was tested in a real life scenario in an elderly care home.