Mobile robot assistants

Mobile robots equipped with mechanisms for communication, interaction, and behaviors are employed more and more outside traditional manufacturing applications, such as in museums or exposition areas. Dependability is one of the main issues in the development of such robot assistants. Fraunhofer IPA has implemented dependable localization, path planning, and obstacle avoidance systems for mobile robots navigation among humans. For the dependable execution of fetch and carry tasks, a new method for sensor-based object manipulation, including object detection, path planning of the manipulator and sensor-based grasping, is introduced. Serveral mobile robots that are equipped with the described software components are presented and analyzed.