# MobiKa - Low-Cost Mobile Robot for Human-Robot Interaction

## TL;DR

This paper presents MobiKa, an affordable mobile robot designed for effective multimodal human-robot interaction to assist elderly individuals, featuring a novel navigation algorithm tested in real-world elderly care settings.

## Contribution

It introduces a low-cost, autonomous mobile robot optimized for HRI, including a new approach for dynamic environment navigation and real-world testing in elderly care.

## Key findings

- Successful autonomous navigation in dynamic environments
- Effective communication with elderly users demonstrated
- Affordable design suitable for real-world deployment

## Abstract

One way to allow elderly people to stay longer in their homes is to use of service robots to support them with everyday tasks. With this goal, we design, develop and evaluate a low-cost mobile robot to communicate with elderly people. The main idea is to create an affordable communication assistant robot which is optimized for multimodal Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Our robot can navigate autonomously through dynamic environments using a new algorithm to calculate poses for approaching persons. The robot was tested in a real life scenario in an elderly care home.