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In 1995 Fraunhofer IPA embarked on a mission towards designing a personal robot assistant for everyday tasks. In the following years Care-O-bot developed into a long-term experiment for exploring and demonstrating new robot technologies and future product visions. The recent fourth generation of the Care-O-bot, introduced in 2014 aimed at designing an integrated system which addressed a number of innovations such as modularity, “low-cost” by making use of new manufacturing processes, and advanced human-user interaction. Some 15 systems were built and the intellectual property (IP) generated by over 20 years of research was recently licensed to a start-up. The presentation will review the path from an experimental platform for building up expertise in various robotic disciplines to recent pilot applications based on the now commercial Care-O-bot hardware.
Dr. Martin Hägele (Fraunhofer Institut für Fertigungstechnik und Automatisierung (IPA) )
Leiter der Abteilung Roboter und Assistenzsysteme
Martin Haegele received engineering degrees from the University of Stuttgart and from the George Washington University, Washington D.C. Haegele and has led the Robot Systems Department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart, Germany since 1993. Today he heads the Institute’s “Intelligent Automation and Clean Manufacturing” division. He is a 2007 recipient of the Joseph Engelberger Award. Furthermore, Haegele is active in the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) and the euRobotics association.