The development of a mobile robot to assist people in their home is a long term goal of Fraunhofer IPA. As a vision of a future household product, the latest prototype, Care-O-bot ® 3, is equipped with the latest industrial state-ofthe art hardware components and offers all modern multimedia and interaction equipment as well as most advanced sensors and control. Care-O-bot ® 3 has been presented to the public on several occasions where it distributed drinks to the visitors of trade fairs and events. Current developments aim at applying the robot in an eldercare facility in order to support the personnel in their daily tasks.
We generalize a previously described architecture that we now call a neuroplanner and apply it to an extension of the problem it was initially designed to solve -the target-directed control of a robot arm in an obstacle cluttered workspace. By target directed, we mean that the arm can position its end-effector at the point of gaze specified by a pair of stereo targetting cameras. Hence the system is able to "touch the point targetted by its eyes". The new design extends the targetting system to an articulated camera platform -the equivalent of the human eye-head-neck system. This permits the robot to solve the inverse problem: given the current configuration of the arm, the system is able to re-orient the camera plaform to focus on the end-&ector. Because of obstacles, the camera platform will generally have to peer around obstacles that block its view. Hence the new system is able to "move the eye-head-neck system to see the hand".
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