CORA: An anthropomorphic robot assistant for human environment

Abstract

We describe the general concept, system architecture, hardware, and the behavioral abilities of CORA (Cooperative Robot Assistant), an autonomous nonmobile robot assistant. Outgoing from our basic assumption that the behavior to perform determines the internal and external structure of the behaving system, we have designed CORA anthropomorphic to allow for humanlike behavioral strategies in solving complex tasks. Although CORA was built as a prototype of a service robot system to assist a human partner in industrial assembly tasks, we will show that CORA's behavioral abilities are also conferrable in a household environment. After the description of the hardware platform and the basic concepts of our approach, we present some experimental results by means of an assembly task.