Development of the Robot of Living Aid: RoLA

Abstract

With increasing number of aging people, taking care of the elderly will become more and more important for future society, especially for those elderly living alone. This paper presents an autonomous mobile robot Rola (Robot of LivingAid), which can handle certain emergency conditions in a home setting to help the elderly through multi-modal sensing and control functions. The implemented functions include visual tracking, video transmission, location aware, navigation, body pose recognition and emergency call out. Rola can accommodate smoothly to the movement of a user through face tracking and performs robot-assisted video conferencing. Rola follows the elderly in the living room using the developed RF-based location aware system. It avoids obstacles in a narrow space employing a laser scanner. Further, Rola can help the elderly as he/she falls down at home. This accidental situation can be detected with a tri-axial accelerometer mounted on the waist of the elderly. It approaches to the elderly by the help of location-aware system and provides timely help through automatic call out and wireless video transmission.