MILO: personal robot platform

Abstract

Recent advances in mobile robotic technology has given rise to new types of robotic applications called personal robotics. The main feature of these applications is that they require low cost robots that involve assisting people in doing their everyday jobs such as providing personal assistance, commercial security, mobile tele-conferencing, tele-presence, home services, entertainment, and elderly care. In this paper we introduce a low cost and general purpose mobile robotic platform called MILO. It offers unique hardware and software features which make MILO suitable for a wide spectrum of personal robotic applications. MILO possesses PC architecture and runs on Windows XP. We have experimentally evaluated MILO's performance. Preliminary results show that MILO can be effectively used to develop personal robotic applications.