Rehabilitation robot in intelligent home environment - software architecture and implementation of a distributed system

Rehabilitation robots (e.g. FRIEND as intelligent wheelchair mounted manipulator) are being developed to gain their user's autonomy within daily life environment. To prevent a high cognitive load onto the user, task input on a high level of abstraction is mandatory. State-of-the-art rehabilitation robots are still not capable to integrate fragments of intelligent behavior into an overall context and to solve complex tasks. A basic problem is how to cope with system complexity as well as computational complexity that evolve during task planning. A compromise towards feasibility is to equip the system's environment with smart components that provide own intelligence and thus reduce the complexity of the robotic system. However, a structured approach is necessary to fuse the distributed intelligence. This paper is about the concept and realization of a software-framework being able to execute autonomous system operations together with information retrieving capabilities and user interactions within a distributed system. Key aspects of development have been to provide robust run-time behavior of the system along with the inclusion and resolving of redundant sensor information as well as to reduce the effort of system programming to a minimum. The application of the developed framework is demonstrated on base of sample steps of its integration with the FRIEND II rehabilitation robotic system within an intelligent home environment.