MobiKa - Low-Cost Mobile Robot for Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

One way to allow elderly people to stay longer in their homes is to use of service robots to support them with everyday tasks. Having this goal in mind, we design, develop, and evaluate a low-cost mobile robot to communicate with elderly people. The main idea is to create an affordable communication assistant robot which is optimized for multimodal Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Our robot can navigate autonomously through dynamic environments using a new algorithm to calculate poses for approaching persons. The robot was tested in a real-life scenario in a residential care home for the elderly.