Publications / 2012 Proceedings of the 29th ISARC, Eindhoven, Netherlands

A novel MiniOn Agent Assisted Robotic Kitchen Platform

Christos Georgoulas, Thomas Linner, Thomas Bock
Abstract:

Purpose Elderly people tend to have several light, or even severe, disabilities, constraining them from most of every household task. Additionally, they tend to consume much of their daily time in the kitchen environment. A typical kitchen arrangement might be useful to most of us, but the actual arrangement and functionality is of greater importance when it comes to ageing society. The proposed paper deals with a novel robotic kitchen environment specifically designed to assist elderly individuals. Method Demographic change design deals with providing design solutions and services ori-ented on specific population categories. The ageing society receives a non-negligible concern in this area, since this population category requires a quite different design approach in household environment1. A compact and modular ap-proach design is proposed, providing enhanced functionality, information technology services, and the ability to accom-modate MiniOn individual robotic agents2, to support the individuals while cooking, serving or cleaning up. Various kitch-en design models were studied in order to conclude the design of the proposed prototype. Test cases were conducted in a real kitchen environment to acquire enough knowledge and to depict the actual problems and limitations the ageing society faces, while performing these relevant tasks. Results & Discussion The proposed kitchen system comprises a series of robotic actuators and sensors, novel space utilization techniques, and a set of visually guided robotic agents to assist in most of the required kitchen tasks. The performance of such a kitchen environment system, can undoubtedly embrace future design approaches, and strongly contribute in demographic change design.

Keywords: Ambient Integrated Robotics, kitchen design, mobile robots