Use of an Autonomous Mobile Robot for Elderly Care

In our societies, there is a steady increase in the elderly population. These people need a constant supervision to perform simple tasks at their homes, which is sometimes not possible. This lack of permanent attention sometimes results in the late detection of emergency situations. Therefore, it is judicious to promote technology that helps to detect and react in case of emergency situations. In the last decade, monitoring devices have been installed in the home environments for the surveillance of the inhabitant. However, due to poor privacy there will be an unfavourably low acceptance of such systems. Another approach to the problem is to develop mobile robots for elderly care. In this scenario, a mobile robot has to navigate from place to place to search for the elderly person. Navigating inefficiently in the home environment may delay the process of searching. This paper focus on the aspect of enhancing navigational efficiency of the robot that would speed up the task of finding human being in the unstructured and dynamic household environment. To achieve precision in searching the human, a behaviour based Markov decision process (MDP) along with a detailed representation of the environment as a grid map have been developed on a small sized indoor autonomous mobile robot, ARTOS.