Improving mobility and autonomy of disabled users via cooperation of assistive robots

摘要

Robotic assistance for disabled users and/or for elderly people represents an active research area and, at the same time, a growing market, which will lead to commercial technological solutions in a near future. Cooperation of existing assistive technologies can represent an important step towards the development of such solutions. In this paper, we face the problem of cooperation between a smart wheelchair and one or more robotic workstations: the wheelchair can navigate autonomously and permits to choose the point to move to or the object to interact with, while the robotic workstation can interact with one or more objects within its workspace and with the user on the wheelchair. The hardware/software architecture is here presented, together with some preliminary results.