Design Issues of a Semi–Autonomous Robotic Assistant for the Health Care Environment

This paper discusses design issues of a mobile robotic assistant for health or home care applications with the objective of relieving hospital personnel or domestic users of time-consuming routine tasks. These tasks are delegated to the robot via natural language and in turn autonomously 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 service robot is presented. A prototype implementation is described and used for demonstrating the performance of the proposed design approach in real-world service scenarios.