Issues and Implementation of a URC Home Service Robot

This paper reviews and discusses many issues and implementation details of an intelligent home service robot in a URC (Ubiquitous Robotic Companion) environment. In contrast to standalone service robots, URC service robots provide a variety of functions by the full utilization of network infrastructure. Many challenges are waiting to be faced in front of us-for example, the execution and coordination of services, multiple team support, session and service management, and communication protocol and its architecture, and resource management of a robot. This paper proposes solutions for the above issues and applies the solutions to a network-based home service robot called Nettoro. As an application of the proposed architecture, a pilot project launched December, 2006 is presented and the results are briefly discussed.