The robotic appliance: the next generation personal assistant?

The rapidly changing demographics in industrialized nations creates a pressing need for effective personal assistive aids that appeal to elderly and disabled users. Our goal is to design robotic aids that are not only affordable and commercially viable but also have universal appeal and benefit. To do so, we explore the creation of the robot appliance, a personal robotic aid with the ability to function within a localized assistive system in a specific environment within the home such as the kitchen. This paper presents our concept of the robot appliance and preliminary results from two design studies involving these concepts of task-restricted, robotic aids. We propose general requirements for these robot appliances and discuss issues of implementation.