Traveling Drinksman: A Mobile Service Robot for People in Care-Homes

This paper describes ongoing work on the development of a service robot for serving drinks to people sitting at tables, for example in the recreation room of a care-house. The robot, denoted the Traveling Drinksman, should be able to detect the occupied tables, navigate safely according to defined policies, and interact with the humans sitting to serve them a drink. We present initial results addressing all of these problems with different sub-modules, including numerical results for the human detection module.