Autonomous Assistant For Self-Determination

Prof. Dr. habil. Alfred Schöttl
Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology

Germanys predicted demographic development poses a particular challenge. The society grows significantly older and the total number of people depended on long-term care rises rapidly. Simultaneously the workforce shrinks. Therefore the desirable expansion of personal care is very limited.

In the future service robots are supposed to fill this gap by assisting caregivers and increasing the independence of people in need of assistance.

The goal of the project „SmartManipulator“ is to research intelligent linkage of manipulator arms to other system components. Currently existing systems use a manual control unit e.g. a joystick.

This is a time-consuming and challenging task even for able-bodied people.

The objective is to augment existing systems with a financially viable perception and planning component. These will make the control of the robotic arm on a higher level of abstraction possible. The user will be able to give commands like „Bring me an apple“ or „Get me a glass of water“ without having to define what the object looks like or where exactly it is.

The perception unit shall recognize the current environment and its related semantics. Obstacles and manipulatable objects will be presented in segmented form and labeled accordingly.

The planning unit has to find trajectories and needs to be modified in order to be able to implement adequate formulations of constraints.