Study on Development of Hospital Service Robot SmartHelper

병원용 서비스 로봇 SmartHelper 개발에 관한 연구

This paper addresses a control architecture for the hospital service robot, SmartHelper. With a sensing-reasoning-acting paradigm, the deliberation takes place at planning layer while the reaction is dealt through the parallel execution of operations. Hence, the system presents both a hierarchical and an heterarchical decomposition, being able to show a predictable response while keeping rapid reactivity to the dynamic environment. The deliberative controller accomplishes four functions which are path generation, selection of navigation way, command and monitoring. The reactive controller uses fuzzy and potential field method for robot navigation. Through simulation under a virtual environment IGRIP, the effectiveness of the control architecture is verified.