Six and a half years after the previous iteration, the Fraunhofer Institute has released an update to Care-o-bot. The affordable service robot for personal and professional use has been made it more agile, more modular and much more personable , bringing science fiction fantasy a little closer to reality.
The latest prototype of the robot is able to glide around and accomplish a variety of tasks. It is able to pick up objects including bottles and drinks and move them to where they are needed. The robot is programmed to work in household environments, so just imagine how useful it could be. Multiple sensors help it know what to pick up and where to bring it without banging into objects and obstacles. Care-o-Bot comes with a mountable tray to assist in carrying things.
The service bot has gone from 20 degrees of freedom to 31 including spherical joints at the torso and neck to let it bend and twist with ease. Its communication skills have also been boosted and now it can convey information through a touchscreen, body gestures, sounds, text-to-speech, and even a laser pointer embedded in its arm.
"Customers can choose between a wide range of sensors," Fraunhofer Institute’s Dr. Ulrich Reiser tells us. "You might choose to have color cameras in the front and a 3D TOF camera in the back, or several 3D-TOF cameras. The sensor ring is equipped with its own computation unit and receives power supply and Ethernet via standard connector, so you might have several sensor rings and exchange them for different applications."
The Care-O-bot could find use as a high-tech waiter, a mobile information center in museums, stores and airports, to collect and deliver objects or, like its predecessor, as a mobile personal and medical assistant.
Based on their experience from previous iterations, Reiser and team found that social interaction was crucial to making their robot more compelling, engaging, and acceptable to humans. That is why this time around Care-O-bot 4 tries to detect the current mood in its surroundings and react accordingly, communicating emotions (as facial expressions) through a touchscreen. In other words, if you believe its creators, Care-O-bot won’t just care for you as a patient , it’ll care about you too.
Dr. Ulrich Reiser of Fraunhofer Institute says
that battery capacity is 30 Ah (at around 48 V) and will typically last between three and five hours, depending on factors like the specific application and the number of degree of movements used.
Check out the video below for more details:
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