Service robots for home assistance

Service robots are a growing market and an increasing number of sales can be observed not only for professional but also for domestic applications such as vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers. More than 600.000 of these systems were sold in 2007. This increases the overall number of domestic service robots in operation to more than 3,4 million. For the next 3 years a strong growth is forecast by manufacturers worldwide. Whereas most of the currently available systems are not very complex, new functionalities such as safe navigation in public environments, object detection and manipulation are getting developed in various research projects. Care-O-bot® 3 is the latest prototype of a complex robotic home assistant developed at Fraunhofer IPA. Equipped with the latest state-of-the-art hardware and a professional design it provides a technology platform for the development and optimization of key technologies and a vision of tomorrow's household products. Future developments aim at improving and integrating these technologies to enable the dependable execution of complex tasks in everyday environments.