Towards Personal Service Robots for the Elderly

Gregory Baltus, Dieter Fox, Francine Gemperle, Jennifer Goetz, Tad Hirsch, Dimitris Magaritis, Mike Montemerlo, Joelle Pineau, Nicholas Roy, Jamie Schulte, Sebastian Thrun

This paper describes the state-of-the art of a large-scale project, aimed towards the development of personal service robots for the elderly population. Taking care of elderly and chronically ill people is one of the major challenges currently faced by society. Needs range from support in manipulation to assisting those with dementia and cognitive impairment. To respond to this challenge, we have developed a first proto-type robot. Using natural language, the robot can provide information related to activities of daily living obtained from the Web. It also enables remote care-givers to establish a ``tele-presence'' in people's home, by relaying back video and audio stream through the Next Generation Internet. The paper describes this early prototype, and it lays out our research agenda towards building service robots for the elderly.

The full paper is available in gzipped Postscript and PDF

@INPROCEEDINGS{Baltus99a,
  AUTHOR         = {Roy, N. and Baltus, G. and Fox, D. and Gemperle, F. and 
                    Goetz, J. and Hirsch, T. and Magaritis, D. and 
                    Montemerlo, M. and Pineau, J. and Schulte, J. and 
                    Thrun, S.},
  TITLE          = {Towards Personal Service Robots for the Elderly},
  YEAR           = {2000},
  ORGANIZATION   = {Carnegie Mellon University},