Research

Moratuwa Intelligent Robot (MIRob): An Intelligent Service Robot for Domestic Environments

An intelligent service robot is a machine that is able to gather information from the environment and use its knowledge to operate safely in a meaningful and purposive manner. Nowadays, intelligent service robots are developed for emerging areas of robotics application such as elderly care, healthcare, assistance and edutainment. Especially, human friendly intelligent service robots are developed to use as assistive aid for elderly or disabled people. A human friendly intelligent service robot could provide both physical and cognitive assistance for the elderly or disabled peoples

Human friendly robotic systems should have abilities to interact with humans in more human-like manner and human cognitive features should be incorporated into them. Therefore, development of human friendly robotic systems is much more challenging task compared to development of industrial task oriented robots. Through excessive research and analysis, many human friendly robotics systems, which have human cognitive features to some degree, have been developed. However, as per today, developed systems are far below compared to the human cognitive abilities.

Therefore, this research project is being conducted with the intention of developing and human friendly service robot for assisting elderly or disabled people in the domestic environment. The research mainly focuses on experience-based learning for achieving human like adaptive friendly capabilities of the service robot. First version of Hardware platform developed as Moratuwa Intelligent Robot (MIRob) is shown in the figure.

 

Intelligent wheelchair robot with human like interactive features for domestic environments

The world experiences a dramatically rising elderly population. As people age, they may become incapacitated in some degree and need assistance from caregivers in doing their daily activities. Since the gap between the supply and demand of caregivers is widening, it is of great significance to develop devices that can support the elderly in their day-to-day life. With the usage of intelligent assistive robotic systems, elderly population can lead a better quality of life independently.

This research focuses on development of an intelligent wheelchair system with intelligent voice and gesture interface for controlling. Furthermore, the proposed intelligent robotic wheelchair will be equipped with a robotic manipulator for pick and place tasks, a laser scanner for perceiving the environment and human friendly controlling interfaces such as natural voice and gestures. This will eventually enhance the rapport between the human users and the assistive robotic aid in order to uplift the living standard of elderly/ disabled people.