Research and Development for Life Support Robots that Coexist in Harmony with People
Nobuto Matsuhira, Hideki Ogawa, Hiroshi Mizoguchi · 2006
Listen for a person's voice Look in that direction Move closer to the person Furthermore, robots are desired that can be used easily by anybody.To solve these problems, it is necessary to develop simple robots first for limited environments and tasks.Next, multifunctional robots should be developed by defining tasks step by step.And environmental design and knowledge embedded in the environment will be collaborated with robots, as necessary.In daily life, not only the technologies for motion control of manipulation and mobility to perform the actual tasks, but also human machine interface technologies are important, such as for interaction between humans and robots by image and voice.A robot cannot perform services unless it communicates with a human to ascertain where he/she is and what he/she wants.Furthermore, it is natural and reliable for a robot to accompany the human when the robot performs services.Accordingly, a robot with omnidirectional auditory function and a robot with visual tracking function for a specified person have been developed as human interface technology.Since a robot is a system, even if the image or voice processing function works well alone, the overall performance of the robot may be insufficient.Seamless integration of all functions, not only vision and auditory functions but also motion, is required.Regarding systemization, so far, the open robot controller architecture has been adopted to integrate auditory, vision, and motion functions as shown in Fig. 1.Robots working in everyday life need integration of vision, hearing, and motion.Vision and hearing are the interface functions enabling the robot to recognize the person and the commands.The voice and sound source position detected by hearing, and environment, obstacles, and human faces will be detected by vision, and the inputs' information is considered in order to plan for the robot motion.For that reason, we developed the auditory function and the person-following function and navigation function using the vision system as core technologies of human-friendly robots as described below.First, the basic function of ApriAlpha TM is explained. Robotic Information Appliance "ApriAlpha TM " with Network AbilityApriAlpha TM is a conceptual model of a robotic information appliance.It recognizes the face and voice of the user and replies to the user by voice, and moves by wheels in the home.The robot was developed to perform the functions of house sitting and intelligent remote control for home appliances.Here, ApriAlpha TM means an advanced personal robotic appliance type alpha. Open robot controller architectureFor ApriAlph TM , the framework of open robot controller architecture was adopted, integrating various robot technologies with a distributed object technology based robot controller that we are currently developing (Ozaki, 2003).An expandable and easy-to-use robot controller can be realized.The distributed object technology can deal easily with various objects for various functions distributed on a network.When executing the desired object, it is unnecessary to be conscious of the object's place on the network.The desired object can be executed by issuing a command message in a standard format.Various robot technologies and/or interfaces with peripheral equipment are included in the system using HORB developed by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) (http://horb.aist.go.jp/).Various modules of ApriAlpha TM are easily combined as shown in Fig. 2. By upgrading these modules or adding new modules, the performance of the robot will be improved or a new robot will be realized.