Refilling Water Bottles in Elderly Care Homes With the Help of a Safe Service Robot

Abstract

This study presents key technologies of a mobile service robot developed to manipulate objects around people safely. We demonstrate this ability to support staff in elderly care homes in the future. The take-over by a service robot allows the staff to spend less time with routine logistical tasks and therefore better focus on the interaction with residents. In the selected application scenario, the robot helps staff by (1) retrieving empty bottles from the residents' rooms, (2) bringing them to the kitchen, (3) taking the refilled bottles back to a table inside the residents' rooms. This task seems trivial for a person, but the robot needs to orchestrate numerous algorithms and components to work smoothly, such as bottle pose detection, manipulation, and navigation. A technical evaluation indicates a high performance of single components, but due to isolated failures, the overall scenario does not always succeed. Next to the technical aspects, it is fundamental to determine the acceptance of the robot, which was achieved by analyzing questionnaires given to care workers. Finally, this paper presents lessons learned to help other researchers in similar use-cases.