CleaningAssistant-a service robot designed for cleaning tasks

A new service robot designed for cleaning tasks in home environments is introduced. The robot systems will work directly with people in these areas, thus placing a central importance in making interactions between people and machines as natural are possible. The main focus of this paper is twofold. First, an introduction to the system's design and to an intuitive programming approach which allows the robot to be easily used by non-experts. The approach is based on human gesture recognition and context sensitive interpretation. Second, in order to transform full coverage paths planned in workspace to paths in the robot's configuration space, a closed form solution of the robot's inverse kinematics is derived. The redundancy of the manipulator is therein used to optimize the inverse kinematics solution in terms of manipulability and closer posture.