Intelligent home service robotic system based on robot technology middleware

The intelligent home service robotic system has been developed in order to assist the aged or the disabled people in the population-aging society. The developed robotic system was demonstrated from June 9 to June 19 at the 2005 World Exposition, Aichi, Japan. The purpose of our research is developing robotic system to provide daily services such as bringing some objects to the elderly or disabled wheelchair users. Network distributed monitoring system was also developed in order to monitor the state of robotic system working and the state of the aged or disabled. The developed system uses Robot Technology Middleware (RTM), which was developed by AIST (Agency of Industrial Science and Technology, Japan) to promote application of Robot Technology (RT) in various fields. RTM is based on CORBA, so has high scaling and inter-operating ability and facilitates network distributed software and sharing. Using RT Middleware, we can develop robotic functional elements as "RT software component", which makes application and system integration easier. This paper introduces the architecture of the developed demonstration robotic system and the results of a demonstration conducted at the exhibition.