A friendly mobile entertainment robot for disabled children

Disabled children, when compared to other children, have fewer opportunities for exploring and interacting with the world. Thus, they are exposed to the feeling that they are unable to do anything by themselves. In this sense, the use of mobile robots may help these children to overcome their limitation and provide means to develop social skills. This paper describes partial results of on-going research on control architectures for mobile robots concerning hardware and software aspects. We propose a behavior-based architecture for the interaction between humans and robots, particularly children with severe motor disabilities. The main goal is to create a modular, flexible and scalable development environment, which motivates children to interact with the robot and the world.