Robot House for Lease

 Anybody want to test their future home robot product inside a robot-ready house? Well, come to Fukuoka City in south of Japan and you can lease a model house - basically for free. The 1,700 square feet house and surrounding area is set up with cameras, LIDARS and thousands of RFID tags.

      

 Just contact Prof. Tsutomu Hasegawa of  Kyushu University, who is the leader of the project that led to the development of this house. "No matter how sophisticated the robots become, it is impossible for them to be of any use to us if the environment didn't support them," says Prof. Hasegawa. If you want the robots to be autonomous, they need to know where they stand and where the humans and other objects are so that they can perform whatever task they are supposed to do.  

 In the past 2 years, Prof. Hasegawa's team has demonstrated a robotic wheel chair that carries a person from the house to a nearby bus stop. Also, together with Yaskawa Electric they showed SmartPal and a smaller companion robot work together inside the house. 

 The core software that supports this environment is called "TMS" which stands for "Town Management System." TMS is open source and you can use it in your own environment with your own sensors, meaning you don't have to fly all the way to Fukuoka to do your experiments. The software will be downloadable soon. The site is not quite ready yet, but it will be similar to something like this.   

 If you do want to use the city-owned facility, researchers from overseas are welcome too, although I must warn you that there are no user manuals in languages other than Japanese. And you will have to pay your own electricity and phone bills. Prof. Hasegawa says that he and his team would be willing to offer technical support based upon a joint research agreement.

 What I thought was really cool when I visited Prof. Hasegawa in Feb. 2009 were the supporting team of robots that work in the background. Photographed below with Prof. Hasegawa are the 3 robots that move around the rooms and outdoors to develop a precise 3D map of the whole environment. Also there is a set of robots that go around the house and neighborhood periodically to check whether all the camera angles have remained where they are supposed to be. I feel symphathy for these hard-working robots that are essential but never seem to get any press because people just don't know they exist.

 

  Prof. Hasegawa's group is now working on applying TMS to a real world environment. One of the first places he would like TMS to be utilized is an elderly care facility. They will be looking into what the needs are and how robots would be able to help.