Contents I. Introduction
The philosophy of designing this robot was to replace or relieve the manpower in taking care of the elderly and hence release the workforce to the workplace. Therefore, the simplicity of remote control was a great concern for the function of the mobile application software (App) and the robot. The basic control by buttons was included but it required much user interactions. To achieve the autonomous navigation, the SLAM technology integrated all the data from different sensors like the low cost laser radar, Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and the encoder to accurate localization while mapping in the unknown area. The map generated was used for planning the path to the assigned destination with obstacles avoidance. Mobile App was developed to assign the coordinates as a goal according to the map and user view of the video streaming. In addition, the auto parking function was created to help the robot autonomously navigate back to the charging station. For interaction with the elderly, the face recognition data from the OpenCV and the ChatterBot was integrated to detect the identity and track the elderly face automatically. The learning and conversational dialog engine from the ChatterBot allowed the robot to receive commands through the voice in various circumstances, e.g. trigger the emergency call when the elderly saying “help” and show video on the tablet when the elderly saying “watch video”.
