Universal Design with Robots Toward the Wide Use of Robots in Daily Life Environment

Robot technology has been cultivated by developing robots that work in special environments, such as industrial robots, robots for performing maintenance in nuclear power plants, and robots for use in space. On the other hand, the application fields of robots are expanding to include aspects of daily life, for example medical robots in hospitals, welfare robots in homes for the elderly, robots to perform cleaning in buildings and robots for use at home. Furthermore, the essentials of robot technology (RT) have been applied widely to endow mechatronics products with intelligence. Advanced examples include implementation of a robotic function in an automobile so that it automatically maintains a distance from the car in front, and an automatic parking function. In particular, various kinds of robots for home use, such as security robots, caretaking robots, information service robots, and communication robots, are now being developed (Japan Robot Association, 2003). A robot that provides support to people at home is generally called a “Daily Life Support Robot” or “Human Symbiosis Robot” in Japan (Japan Robot Association, 2005, 2006), (Matsuhira et al., 2005), (Hosoda et al., 2006). However, it is still difficult to realize a home robot capable of moving through doors and coping with differences in level, although the growing popularity of barrier-free designs are helpful in this regard. Here, we consider the concept of Universal Design (UD). UD, which is a design concept that aims to satisfy the needs of everybody in daily life, is also important for home robots or robots in daily life environment. Robots can move easily where wheelchairs can move easily. Robots can easily handle what a person who has trouble handling things can handle easily. Similarly, robots can easily find a sign that is easy for a person with impaired sight to find. A robot will be thought as one of users for UD. Thus the UD is important. Improvement of the environment by applying the UD concept is expected to lead to expansion of the sphere of robot activity and to spur practical use of robots. We propose Universal Design with Robots (UDRobTM), a universal design concept encompassing both people and robots (Matsuhira et al., 2004), (Wada, 2004). A conceptual design of a robot-system based on UDRobTM has been developed and is presented here. So far, robot design has been mainly considered in terms of the figure or shape of robots themselves. We adopt the UD both for robots and the