Development of a concept model of a robotic information home appliance, ApriAlpha

We have proposed a concept of a robotic information home appliance corresponding to one category of home robots, and developed ApriAlpha, a concept model of the robotic information home appliance. ApriAlpha is a wheel locomotion type human friendly home robot which controls advanced home appliances, standing between their users and them as a voice controlled information terminal, and offers security and information services to users. We have integrated various robot technologies such as voice communication, image recognition, planning and motion control on ApriAlpha, and we have introduced a framework of the distributed object technology based open robot controller architecture (ORCA), which we are currently developing in view of its easy extension and efficient development. This paper describes the proposed robotic information home appliance and its concept model, ApriAlpha. The functions of the developed robot are confirmed by performing several demonstrations, and the merit of applying the framework of ORCA to the home robot controller is also confirmed through its development.