Advanced service robotics for human assistance and support

There are growing demands on robotics and automation in the service sector for many years due to the age quake, silver society and man power shortage. Now that robotics is so advanced with sensor, actuator and computational intelligence along with the CPU development, it is expected to make much wider applications to service sector. Some are good for robot to be more intelligent and more effective. In this presentation, the robotics and automation is overviewed for the sake of human assistance and supports. Then there have been so many attempts to make robots more friendly and usable to human and some showed very successful results in bio-medicine field, material flow and daily life. Firstly, the “intelligent cane system” is presented as one of the examples of advanced service robotics systems. Secondary, a model for assembly strategy generation and selection for human and robot coordinated (HRC) cell assembly by a Dual Generalized Stochastic Petri Net (GSPN) model is discussed within the field of human and robot coordinated (HRC) cell assembly. From these applications, it turned out to be much more important for human service sector such that advanced robotics and automation system in this domain should have more cognitive functions as human intention estimation explicitly.