New robot applications in production and service

In the past considerable efforts have been invested in developing systems which support autonomous task execution or navigation of robots in (partially) unstructured environments. Technological advances resulted in a new application area for robots: the service sector. This paper presents several examples of service robots and an example of an industrial robot with different degrees of automation in their task execution. All these examples show one goal: the improvement of environmental conditions and therefore indirectly the protection of our natural environment. The role of the operator/user interaction with the system is demonstrated with three examples of prototype robots. In all examples referencing the robot to the object turned out to be of crucial importance for accurate task execution. This lead to the use of a new optical measurement system: the Reseau Scanning Camera (RSC)