A SIMULATED ENVIRONMENT FOR ELDERLY CARE ROBOT

Abstract

The population of elderly people is increasing steadily in developed countries. Among many other technological methodologies, robotic solutions are being considered for their monitoring and health care services. It is always desired to validate all aspects of robotic behavior prior to their use in an elderly care setup. This validation and testing is not easily possible in real life scenario as tests are needed to be performed repeatedly under same environmental conditions and controlling different parameters of a real environment is a dif cult requirement to achieve. Developing and using 3D simulations is the most bene cial solution in such scenarios, where different parameters can be adjusted and different experiments with identical environmental conditions can be conducted. In this paper development of a simulated environment for an autonomous mobile robot, ARTOS, has been presented. The simulated environment imitates a real apartment and consists of different rooms with a variety of furniture. To make the situation more realistic, an animated human character is also developed to validate the robotic behavior. As an application scenario, searching of the human character by the robot in the simulated environment is presented, where the simulated human walks through different rooms and the robot tries to nd him. 1