ROMAN: a mobile robotic assistant for indoor service applications

The paper describes design issues of a mobile service robot for health care applications and domestic automation. Key components required for achieving semi-autonomous operation are surveyed, including: 1. a highly maneuverable locomotion platform, 2. an anthropomorphous manipulator, 3. a reliable multisensor system, and a 4. multimodal human-robot-interface. In addition, related information processing and control methodologies are presented. Special emphasis is put on a system architecture for integration of the individual components into a full-size service robot. Performance and usefulness of the proposed approaches are demonstrated through experiments in various real-world service scenarios.