Written on July 11, 2008 – 9:26 am | by Bogdan Alex |
Hiring a housekeeper might not be such a good idea, especially when you have valuable things. Don’t you worry about that. Soon, you’ll be able to buy a special robot that will take care of your household.

The one-armed Care-O-Bot 3 is only 1.45 meters high, and is among the first service robots specifically designed to help humans in the household. According to Gizmag, it was developed by research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart.

In order to detect all the objects and persons in a house, the robot is fitted with numerous sensors to prevent this from happening. It integrates the latest in stereo-vision color cameras, laser scanners and 3-D range cameras so it can register its surroundings in three dimensions and in real time. If a person moves into the radius of its arm, it stops moving. The robotized helper can easily move in every direction. “This is made possible by an omnidirectional platform with four separately steered and driven wheels,” explains Birgit Graf, who heads the domestic and personal service robotics group at IPA. “In this way, the robot can even pass safely through narrow places in an apartment.” Although the robot has only one arm, it’s still able to perform complicated maneuvers because we’re talking about a special flexible arm with seven degrees of freedom and a hand with three fingers. This allows it to pick up bottles, cups and similar objects and to operate other apparel. The robot will never grasp things in a brutal way, thanks to some force sensors. The arm and the grippers were developed by Schunk.

Care-O-bot 3 also come with an integrated tray that helps it carry items, specifically beverages and food. Integrated in the tray is a touch screen via which the robot can be controlled. “But the robot can also be directed by spoken commands. Unlike its predecessors, it can even recognize and respond to gestures,” explains Graf. Furthermore, the robot comes with a memory of its own, which includes numerous household articles stored into a database. If it doesn’t recognize the object you are instructing it to bring, all you need to do is places the unfamiliar object in the robot’s hand so that it can gain a three-dimensional impression of the item and quickly store it in the database.