CleaningAssistant-a service robot designed for cleaning tasks

A new service robot designed for cleaning tasks in home environments is introduced. The robot systems will work directly with people in these areas, thus placing a central importance in making interactions between people and machines as natural are possible. The main focus of this paper is twofold. First, an introduction to the system´s design and to an intuitive programming approach which allows the robot to be easily used by non-experts. The approach is based on human gesture recognition and context sensitive interpretation. Second, in order to transform full coverage paths planned in workspace to paths in the robot´s configuration space, a closed form solution of the robot´s inverse kinematics is derived. The redundancy of the manipulator is therein used to optimize the inverse kinematics solution in terms of manipulability and closer posture