Mobile monitoring of physical states of indoor environments for personal support

Mobile service robots are expected to operate in our daily life soon, as mobile robot technologies such as SLAM are rapidly developing. As a new application area of the technologies, we propose mobile monitoring and support robot (MMSR), which maintains a residential environment to be comfortable, safe, and secure. A key to realizing MMSRs is monitoring the physical state of the environment. By using a mobile robot as a mobile sensor base, an MMSR can efficiently obtain only necessary environmental information such as the temperature of the location of a person. It can then do supporting actions such as controlling appliances to make the environment more comfortable. We have developed and tested a prototype of MMSR to show the potential feasibility of MMSR concept.