Towards Robotic Smart Homes

The nowadays smart homes try to move from conventional remote-controlled houses to intelligent environments. The focus has been made in blending high-tech computing into the home environment and in substituting the interaction with a box on a table by different friendly & intelligent HMI devices. Nevertheless, the introduction of real robots in home environment isn’t treated yet. How will be the new smart homes with robots moving among their inhabitants? This type of homes, called robotic smart homes, will be very different of the conventional smart ones. The paper deals with the state-of-the-art of personal home robots and with the homes design in which these robots will move. One of the key issues is the analysis of the nowadays home space and the adaptation of the robots’ locomotion system for them. Several types of robots (mobile, climbing and bipedal) together with the new home and rooms structure have been analyzed, together with the smart homes control system.