Marvin: Innovative Omni-Directional Robotic Assistant for Domestic Environments

Technology is progressively reshaping the domestic environment as we know it, enhancing home security and the overall ambient quality through smart connected devices. However, demographic shift and pandemics recently demonstrate to cause isolation of elderly people in their houses, generating the need for a reliable assistive figure. Robotic assistants are the new frontier of innovation for domestic welfare. Elderly monitoring is only one of the possible service applications an intelligent robotic platform can handle for collective wellbeing. In this paper, we present Marvin, a novel assistive robot we developed with a modular layer-based architecture, merging a flexible mechanical design with state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence for perception and vocal control. With respect to previous works on robotic assistants, we propose an omnidirectional platform provided with four mecanum wheels, which enable autonomous navigation in conjunction with efficient obstacle avoidance in cluttered environments. Moreover, we design a controllable positioning device to extend the visual range of sensors and to improve the access to the user interface for telepresence and connectivity. Lightweight deep learning solutions for visual perception, person pose classification and vocal command completely run on the embedded hardware of the robot, avoiding privacy issues arising from private data collection on cloud services.