Work Assistive Mobile Robot for the Disabled in a Real Work Environment

Abstract

Previous works related to welfare service robotics have mainly focused on assisting the disabled in their daily life. Robot systems such as the Intelligent Bed-Robot System (Kim et al. 2002) and Care Robot System (Yoo, 2003a) are designed to help the disabled in performing daily activities in specialized indoor environments. Human-machine interfaces such as Eye Gaze Estimation System (Yoo, 2003b) have been developed to facilitate easy control of the robot system. FRIEND (Martens, 2001) and KARES II (Bien, 2003) are wheelchair-based rehabilitation robotic systems equipped with a robot arm and are designed to help the disabled manipulate small objects such as food, drink, books, etc. It is important that human beings have the opportunity to feel self-worth and happiness by living productive lives through their own vocation. Therefore, the development of a vocational robotic system has important implications with respect to welfare. Although some vocational assistive robots have been developed, they are limited to office environments. The robot RAID (Eftring, 1993), which was developed at the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center in Sweden, assists in removing books from a bookshelf, bringing documents, and serving drinks in a office environment. The robot known as WALKY (Neveryd, 1994) can avoid obstacles while it maneuvers to deliver objects in a laboratory environment. The robot ProVAR (Van der Loos, 1999) receives orders via a speech recognition system and helps to process office tasks such as serving drinks and delivering documents, diskettes, video tapes, etc. In addition, the current status of the robot is displayed through a monitor. Due to regional differences in industrial structures, the types of tasks that the disabled can perform differ from country to country. As a result, robots assisting the disabled in a real manufacturing environment can be more useful than robots providing assistance in office environments in some countries. However, there has been relatively little research reported on the development of vocational robotic systems in real manufacturing environments. The objective of the present work is to develop mobile robot systems that assist the disabled to work in real manufacturing factories. Specifically, the assistive robot is targeted for the disabled in Korea, where the authors dwell. In this research, to clearly determine the objectives of developing assistive mobile robots, a mission statement is addressed based on statistical data. Furthermore, the target manufacturing environment is surveyed to specify the dimensions and working algorithm of the work assistive mobile robot. Two work assistive mobile robots are