Lio-A Personal Robot Assistant for Human-Robot Interaction and Care Applications

Abstract

Lio is a mobile robot platform with a multi-functional arm explicitly designed for human-robot interaction and personal care assistant tasks. The robot has already been deployed in several health care facilities, where it is functioning autonomously, assisting staff and patients on an everyday basis. Lio is intrinsically safe by having full coverage in soft artificial-leather material as well as collision detection, limited speed and forces. Furthermore, the robot has a compliant motion controller. A combination of visual, audio, laser, ultrasound and mechanical sensors are used for safe navigation and environment understanding. The ROS-enabled setup allows researchers to access raw sensor data as well as have direct control of the robot. The friendly appearance of Lio has resulted in the robot being well accepted by health care staff and patients. Fully autonomous operation is made possible by a flexible decision engine, autonomous navigation and automatic recharging. Combined with time-scheduled task triggers, this allows Lio to operate throughout the day, with a battery life of up to 8 hours and recharging during idle times. A combination of powerful computing units provides enough processing power to deploy artificial intelligence and deep learning-based solutions on-board the robot without the need to send any sensitive data to cloud services, guaranteeing compliance with privacy requirements. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lio was rapidly adjusted to perform additional functionality like disinfection and remote elevated body temperature detection. It complies with ISO13482 - Safety requirements for personal care robots, meaning it can be directly tested and deployed in care facilities.

A literature survey of the robotic technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…A mobile robot platform was proposed with a multi-functional arm based on the human-robot interaction towards personalised care and assistance [ 51 ]. The proposed robot is then modified to perform extra functions like disinfection and body temperature detection during the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Robots as intelligent assistants to face COVID-19 pandemic

“…One of the most complete and concrete products is presented in [ 15 ]. In this paper, the Lio robot and its hardware and software features are presented.…”

BIM-Integrated Collaborative Robotics for Application in Building Construction and Maintenance

“…Several robotic solutions for disinfection have been recently developed, for instance, based on ultraviolet light [56][57][58][59][60], spraying of disinfectant [60,61], or a combination of both [60]. The navigation of the existing robotic systems is enabled using ROS and sensor data [57,58,61], embedded navigation and localization with deep learning for semantic environment mapping [56], and the use of predefined maps of areas to disinfect [60]. Our results enable us to enhance perception and navigation capabilities of robotic systems thanks to the bidirectional connection to IFC files, where metadata is updated to be readable on authoring BIM software tools.…”