LocoMaid (the locomotion aid) - a distributed architecture for planning and control

Touch-interacting, autonomous mobile robots are of extreme interest in different scenarios, which include: (i) manoeuvring in crowded environments, (ii) slave guidance, and (iii) walking aids in rehabilitation and in helping elderly or impaired people. A mobile robot becomes a walking aid when an impaired person can lean on it safely and purposively. Safety, flexibility, responsiveness, adaptation require a kind of intelligence distributed over the three categories above. All these topics are particularly stressed when the robot is asked to perform as a walking aid. In this paper, in particular, we focus mainly on the P&C architecture, on which safety and real-time mainly depend.