Preliminary Development of a Walk-Helper Application Agent with an Assistant Personal Robot.

This paper presents a preliminary implementation of a walk-helper mode embedded in an Assistant Personal Robot as a complementary feature implementation in the mobile robot. This mode enables a bidirectional interaction between the user and the mobile robot in order to perform a short displacement. On the one hand, the user drives the mobile robot by pressing its support arms and, on the other hand, the mobile robot is aware of obstacles and unstructured areas in order to smoothly correct the user path. This new application has been tested with users in controlled environments providing optimistic results from feedbacks.