Towards developing a multipurpose assistive vehicle robot capable of providing assistance to caregivers and support to elderly people

In industrialized countries, regional disparities in healthcare and welfare services, increased medical expense caused by aging societies, and shortages of medical staff have become serious problems. Assistive robots are developed to improve the security, independence and quality of the elderly. However, current assistive robots are only designed to accomplish one task and still require technical knowledge from the elderly and/or care givers to exploit the robot´s capabilities. Therefore, the next generation of assistive robots has to be natural and intuitive to interact with, communicate with, work with as partners, and learn to adapt to their respective needs. For this purpose, the development of a multipurpose human-friendly assistive robot vehicle has been proposed at Karlstad University. The proposed system is being designed for providing walking-support to the elderly, as well as assistance for carrying-medical tools to care-givers. In this paper, the current development progress of two assistive robot vehicles will be described: an intelligent carrying-medical tools robot vehicle and a human-friendly assistive robot vehicle for supporting physically elderly.