Towards robotic assistants in nursing homes: challenges and results.

J. Pineau, M. Montemerlo, N. Roy, S. Thrun, and M. Pollack.

This paper describes a mobile robotic assistant, developed to assist elderly individuals with mild cognitive and physical impairments, as well as support nurses in their daily activities. We present three software modules relevant to ensure successful human-robot interaction: an automated reminder system; a people-tracking and detection system; and finally a high-level robot controller which performs planning under uncertainty by incorporating knowledge from low-level modules, and selecting appropriate courses of actions. During the course of experiments conducted in an assisted living facility, the robot successfully demonstrated that it could autonomously provide reminders and guidance for elderly residents.

The full paper is available in PDF and gzipped Postscript

@INPROCEEDINGS{Pineau02f,
  AUTHOR	= {Pineau, J. and Montemerlo, M. and Pollack, M. and Roy, N. and Thrun, S.},
  TITLE		= {Towards robotic assistants in nursing homes: challenges and results},
  YEAR		= {2002},
  BOOKTITLE	= {Workshop notes (WS8: Workshop on Robot as Partner: An Exploration of Social Robots), IEEE International Conference on Robots and Systems},
  EDITOR	= {Fong, T. and Nourbakhsh, I.},
  PUBLISHER	= {IEEE},
  ADDRESS	= {Lausanne, Switzerland}
}