An Approach to the Next Generation Robot System

The robot technology (RT) application is expected to spread out over a huge field, such as service robot application, medical/welfare application, etc. Depending on the application, various kinds of robot systems should be developed and customized for their own tasks. However, the cost of developing and customizing each robot system is high enough to prevent the market growth of such robot systems. To overcome this problem, we propose a concept of a hierarchical approach to robot system development. First, RT components are integrated as RT units, which respectively have basic functions for robot systems, so that their users can utilize them without special knowledge about its components. The robot system can then be constructed as a combination of RT units with necessary functions. We have developed some RT units and proved the effectiveness of this approach constructing an experimental system "SmartPal" from these units