Use of an Autonomous Mobile Robot for Elderly Care Karsten Berns, Syed Atif Mehdi Robotics Research Lab, Department of Computer Sciences University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany Email: {berns,mehdi}@cs.uni-kl.de Abstract—In our societies, there is a steady increase in the elderly population. These people need a constant supervision to perform simple tasks at their homes, which is sometimes not possible. This lack of permanent attention sometimes results in the late detection of emergency situations. Therefore, it is judicious to promote technology that helps to detect and react in case of emergency situations. In the last decade, monitoring devices have been installed in the home environments for the surveillance of the inhabitant. However, due to poor privacy there will be an unfavourably low acceptance of such systems. Another approach to the problem is to develop mobile robots for elderly care. In this scenario, a mobile robot has to navigate from place to place to search for the elderly person. Navigating inefficiently in the home environment may delay the process of searching. This paper focus on the aspect of enhancing navigational efficiency of the robot that would speed up the task of finding human being in the unstructured and dynamic household environment. To achieve precision in searching the human, a behaviour based Markov decision process (MDP) along with a detailed representation of the environment as a grid map have been developed on a small sized indoor autonomous mobile robot, ARTOS. Index Terms—Elderly Care, Indoor Robot, Service Robot I. I NTRODUCTION The demographic situation in many developed countries is showing a steady growth in the population of senior citizens. Elderly people are often not able to perform all activities of their daily life without the help of caregivers and face a higher risk of experiencing a medical emergency in unattended situations. Therefore, they usually have to move to assisted living facilities where they are looked after by the nursing staff. Due to limited number of nursing staff and increasing costs of such facilities, many research groups use modern technologies to assist elderly people at their homes. The aim is not only to lower the nursing costs but also to increase the quality of life of senior citizens. Autonomous Robot for Transport and Service (ARTOS), Figure 1, is an initiative to provide services to the elderly people, living alone in their homes. It is equipped with laser range finder, ultrasonic sensors, RFID 1 reader, tactile sensors and a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera. Figure 2 shows the sensing range of ARTOS. The control system is based on the MCA- KL 2 . Many components are being developed as behaviours of 1 R adio F requency ID entification 2 MCA-KL: M odular C ontroller A rchitecture - Kaiserslautern Branch (http://rrlib.cs.uni-kl.de/) Fig. 1. A utonomous R obot for T ranspo rt and S ervice (ARTOS) the behaviour based control architecture iB2C 3 [1]. Bumper Laser Range Finder Ultrasonic Sensors Fig. 2. Sensing Range of ARTOS ARTOS has been specially designed for indoor living en- vironments and is able to navigate through narrow corridors and closely placed furniture in the living environment. A telecommunication link can be established between the elderly person and the caregivers using wireless Internet of the robot. Moreover, it can be tele-operated in the environment by the health care personnel to detect medical emergencies. To enhance the privacy of the elderly person and relieve the caregivers from extensive supervision all the time, ARTOS should be able detect and analyse the emergency situation on its own as a first step. In case any such situation is detected, as a second step, an emergency call to the caregiver should be established for immediate help and analysis of the situation. To achieve this goal, primary task is to search the human being in the environment while navigating autonomously through the 3 iB2C: i ntegrated B ehaviour-B ased C ontrol