Introducing GARMI - A Service Robotics Platform to Support the Elderly at Home: Design Philosophy, System Overview and First Results
Mario Tröbinger, Christoph Jähne, Zheng Qu, Jean Elsner, Anton Reindl, Sebastian Getz, Thore Goll, Benjamin Loinger
Abstract
This letter introduces GARMI, a service robotics platform conceptualized with a focus on assisting elderly at home. GARMI is designed to provide support with household tasks, as an avatar for tactile-enabled communication and as an interface for telemedicine and emergency assistance. Its unique humanoid design features a sensor-equipped multi-modal head designed for natural human-machine communication as well as a whole-body torque-control interface for safe physical human-machine interaction. GARMI's modular software architecture and distinctive whole-body control scheme allows multimodal dynamic coupling. Additionally, every system component can actively produce as well as sense forces and can thus serve as a haptic feedback interface when interacting with its environment and users. Furthermore, GARMI is the first mobile humanoid designed with specialized use-inspired avatar stations: PARTI for dual-arm-based exoskeleton-like remote-control with force-feedback and MUCKI for transparent remote doctor-patient interaction with both audiovisual and safe haptic feedback. The specialized software architecture allows for rapid prototyping and field-testing of new behaviors for telemedicine, multi-modal interaction and autonomous physical and service assistance. Our first results reveal the potential of our use-driven force-based whole-body control mobile humanoid for daily living and telemedicine scenarios in an elderly care research facility.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ral2021_introducinggarmi,
title = {Introducing GARMI - A Service Robotics Platform to Support the Elderly at Home: Design Philosophy, System Overview and First Results},
author = {Mario Tröbinger and Christoph Jähne and Zheng Qu and Jean Elsner and Anton Reindl and Sebastian Getz and Thore Goll and Benjamin Loinger and Tamara Loibl and Christoph Kugler and Carles Calafell and Mohamadreza Sabaghian and Tobias Ende and Daniel Wahrmann and Sven Parusel and Simon Haddadin and Sami Haddadin},
booktitle = {RA-L 2021},
year = {2021}
}