智慧型行動輔助居家照護機器人研發---子計畫二：智慧型行動輔助居家照護機器人之嵌入式軟硬體平台設計與開發(III)

Abstract

居家照護機器人是一種可以協助老人居家生活的機器人，包括行動輔助器、外 出跟隨與協助器，以及居家生活照護系統等。其中，行動輔具可以減緩老人在感覺 運動協調能力退化的情形；外出跟隨與協助器則可以協助老人於外出時，很容易找 到目的地，避免走失情形的發生，同時可以協助老人搬運重物；居家照護機器人則 可接收生理資訊，供作醫療診斷參考之用，並可協助老人進行必要之居家健康訓 練，協助老人的肌力發展與平衡。 在開發這類機器人系統方面，早期的實作方式多為自行設計可以直接執行各項 功能的硬體，利用等效的積體電路來取代處理器與軟體，系統中並不需含有處理器 與軟體。然而，這種僅採用硬體電路的設計方式，非常缺乏彈性。如果能以修改部 分軟體程式碼的方式來實現系統，其製作成本與過程，將比重新設計硬體電路來得 低廉與簡單。 因此，本計畫將利用先進的嵌入式系統技術，提供多工排程、平行處理與即時 回應的能力，有效地解決各階段機器人系統發展與擴充等問題，其功能方面更能貼 近各階段機器人系統的規格要求。基本上，嵌入式軟硬體平台可以說是行動輔助機 具與居家照護機器人的主要核心，可用於整合並控制著各式各樣的周邊設備與感測 器，接收資料、做出適度的回應等。因此，在這個子計畫中，研究人員將針對智慧 型行動輔助、居家照護機器人等各階段系統應用，評估並設計適用的嵌入式軟硬體 平台，使其能完成專屬任務。

Life-assistant robot is a kind of robot system that can help elder people to improve their life qualities. A life-assistant robot system includes the robot walker, robot follower and robot companion. The robot walker can help relieve the degenerations of sense organs and movement coordination capability. The robot follower can help elder people find the specified destinations easily and carry heavy stuffs. The robot companion can collect the vital information as the references of medical diagnosis, while it can also help elder people perform some essential health exercise at home in order to develop and sustain their muscle strength and balance. On developing such kinds of robotic systems, earlier designs took the pure hardware oriented approaches that almost all required functionalities were implemented via dedicated hardware components and integrated circuits instead of general-purposed processors running appropriate software systems. Unfortunately, such pure hardware based approach has the problem of flexibility and extension. Alternatively, if certain parts in the system can be redesigned and implemented with the software-based approach, the manufacturing process can be more cost effective than designing the whole hardware system again. In this project, we plan to take the advantage of the modern embedded software system that provides multi-tasking and scheduling, parallel and real-time processing features. The proposed embedded software approach can effectively solve the issues that may occur during the robot development and future extension stages, while providing a richer specification to better fit the robotic system requirements of each stage. In general, the proposed embedded hardware and software platform can be considered as the core system of life-assistant robots and serve the purposes of integrating and controlling various peripherals and sensors. The embedded platform can also collect all the information and take the appropriate actions based on what it has known. As a result, researchers in this project will focus on the scopes of intelligent movement assistant and life-assistant robots and pursue the necessary survey of suitable embedded hardware and software platform that can accomplish the designated goals.