SAM: A robotic butler for handicapped people

This article presents a service robotic system for disabled people. SAM is a mobile platform that grasps any textured object in an apartment-like environment. The object grasping is realized with a robotic arm, mounted onto the mobile unit. Thanks to the stereo rig on the armpsilas gripper, the user defines the object to grasp on a remote screen, in a very simple way, and the grasping is autonomously performed by visual servoing. The scheduling of the operations is defined and controlled with automatons that are dynamically interpreted with a scenario manager. At last, the communication between the different components is realized with web services through a DPWS layer, providing an efficient solution for sharing data between any device of an intelligent home. Experiments confirm the validity of our approach.