Motion planning for fetch-and-give task using wagon and service robot

Abstract

Daily life assistance for elderly individuals in hospitals and care facilities is one of the most urgent and promising applications for service robots. Especially, a fetch-and-give task is a frequent and fundamental task for service robots to assist elderlys daily life. In hospitals and care facilities, this task is often performed with a movable platform such as a wagon or a cart to carry and deliver a large amount of objects at once. Thus the navigation and control of not only a service robot but also a movable platform must be planned safely. In addition, a robot motion planning to hand over an object to a person safely and comfortably according to his/her posture is also an important problem in this task, however this has not been discussed so much. In this work, we present a coordinate motion planning technique for a fetch-and-give task using a wagon and a service robot. Handover motion is also planned by considering the manipulability of both a robot and a person. Experiments of a fetch-and-give task using a service robot are successfully carried out.