DESIGN ISSUES OF A SEMIAUTONOMOUS ROBOTIC ASSISTANT FOR THE HEALTH-CARE ENVIRONMENT

This paper discusses design issues of a mobile robotic assistant for h ealth or home care applications with the objective of relieving hospit al personnel or domestic users of time-consuming routine tasks. These tasks are delegated to the robot via natural language and in turn auto nomously executed. With respect to the execution of typical fetch-and- carry tasks, key components are surveyed and a system architecture for integration of the individual hardware and software modules into a se rvice robot is presented. A prototype implementation is described and used for demonstrating the performance of the proposed design approach in real-world service scenarios.