A Smart Home Based on Multi-heterogeneous Robots and Sensor Networks for Elderly Care

To tackle behavioral assistance for elderly care in daily life, our laboratory rollout seven homecare robots: walking support robot, gait rehabilitation robot, intelligent wheelchair robot, excretory support robot, personal care robot, intelligent bed, and transport robot. By integrating the multi-heterogeneous robot systems (MHRS) and distributed sensor networks, we propose a novel smart home for elderly care that can cover most life behaviors. Furthermore, to realize that the MHRS can efficiently serve multi-user within the architecture of the smart home. A self-organizing MHRS architecture is proposed. This architecture combines specific tasks to establish a robot group communication mechanism, and multi-robot in the group can complete adaptive control according to the user’s real-time position, ensuring assist safety and adaptability. Finally, we conducted experiments in the proposed smart home to rising transfer, standing transfer, and behavior assistance. The experiments show the proposed smart home has the auxiliary capabilities for basic activities of daily living (ADLs), instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), enhanced activities of daily living (EADLs) even continuous assistance in safety and comfortable way, which can be used in homes, hospitals, rehabilitation center and other scenes for elderly care.