Automation and Robotic Assisted Living

Bill Gates today announces the era of service robotics and estimates that service robotics as part of assisted environments will undergo a similar fast and rigid development as the spread of personal computers in private and economic areas since the nineties. Already in 1961 Joe Engelberger wondered if relegating robotic technologies to only industrial applications makes any sense: "The biggest market will be service robots," Today robots and distributed robotic subsystems actually start to permeate our every day surrounding home/town environment enhancing it with a multitude of services and additional performances. At the same time, this permeation is likely to dramatically transform our perception of robotic systems, robot technology, robots’ performance and the environment they are becoming merged with. In order to make visible these transformations, the following article examines new application fields of robotics integrated with our living environment and related logical transformations on the basis of project works of an interdisciplinary course on "Ambient Innovation Robotics".