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The chapter presents the state of the art and the current trends in the field of service robotics. A set of data reports compiled by the International Federation of Robotics are presented in order to provide a better understanding of the behavior of the service robot market worldwide. A few examples of novel robots, considered representative for the technical trends, are shortly described for each category (professional service robots and personal/domestic service robots). Also there are presented a few non-industrial sources of components (mechanical structure, actuators and sensors, computing and software) that can be used as starting blocks for any new type of service robot. A few community driven projects and competitions are also shortly detailed, as these are the main drive for setting the new trends in the world of service robotics.

This paper presents the development of a voice and gesture based interface (HMI – Human - Machine Interface) for the human control of a mobile robot. The application utilizes the Microsoft Kinect sensor and its Visual Studio C# libraries for voice and gestures recognition. Once, the specific voice commands or gestures are recognized, the controller (a PC or Laptop) sends specific commands to a microcontroller (ATmega2560 on an Arduino Mega board). The microcontroller is mounted on the mobile robot and controls the robot’s motors. Also there are presented some limitations of the Kinect sensor to be taken into consideration when using it.

This paper presents our work regarding two different applications that use the electromyography sensors incorporated in the Thalmic Labs Myo Armband. The first application is about the HumanMachine Interface (HMI) for controlling an industrial robot bycreating the environment for the user to control a robot’s gripper position just by moving his arm. The second application refers to the real time control of a tracked mobile robot that is built with the Arduino development board. For each application thesystem design and the experimental results are presented.

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