Learning with a friendly interactive robot for service tasks in hospital environments

Our work addresses the problem of the control of a mobile robot. We present FIRST, a Friendly Interactive Robot for Service Tasks, designed to carry heavy loads in hospitals. A learning method is used to teach it the set of all the trajectories it has to follow. During the learning phase, a human operator teleoperates the robot while its sensors are activated. So the trajectory is built according to these data. The teleoperation is easy and accurate thanks to several locomotion modes of the robot, specially a crab mode. A “Learning Computer” helps the operator in each phase of the learning process. As the missions feasibility must be ensured each trajectory is checked before used. Eventually, while performing the mission, the robot compares the measurements provided by the localization system and the learned points in order to ensure an accurate trajectory tracking