Software platform design for personal service robots in healthcare

This paper describes the software platform design of a personal service robot with application to healthcare scenarios. The platform was designed after exploration of both the service application and software architectural design spaces. The service application considered here is a comprehensive medication management service which evolved to be one of the more complex use cases in the Healthbots project. While algorithms and user studies of human robot interaction are reported in the literature, there is less attention given to related software frameworks and tools, which are addressed in this paper. The paper focuses and solves numerous design challenges to achieve the desired functionality of the medication management service with its complex set of workflow and contextual requirements which were not present in the software platforms we had designed. The robots were used in a real world deployment scenario at an Aged Care Facility. Scenarios and results from a field trial are presented to enable the research community to understand the technological and engineering challenges of deployment of the robot system and the level of fluid integration required to achieve the desired goals of functionality and robustness in the real world.