A modular and distributed supervisory system for a semi-autonomous personal robot for household applications

Abstract

The development of personal robots dedicated to service tasks, such as the assistance to the disabled and the elderly at home and/or in residential institutions, is certainly one of the most attractive challenges currently being faced by the robotics community world-wide. This paper aims at providing a specific contribution to one of the most interesting technical problems related to the development of such systems, i.e. high-level control and supervision during task execution, and describes an innovative approach for a semi-autonomous personal robot for household applications, based on the concepts of 'levels of autonomy' and 'system distribution'. It also describes the implementation of such an approach for the supervisor of the MOVAID robotic system, for residential care of disabled and elderly people. In the paper, the proposed approach is presented. Its current implementation for the MOVAID prototype, based on an object-oriented behavioural scheme, is also illustrated with preliminary indications on the experimental results and possible future developments.