Robotic Communication Terminals as a Ubiquitous System for Improving Human Mobility by Making Environment Virtually Barrier-Free

摘要

Mobility represents very basic and essential behavior for people: reaching a destination, strolling at will, and much more. Indispensable for independence, it also makes life more enjoyable. Yet moving from place to place may be difficult for disabled, elderly, or ill individuals affected by an impairment of sight, hearing, or lower-extremity motor function, which undermine abilities needed for mobility: recognizing things, controlling motor function, and accessing information. To offset this, countries and communities have been actively preparing systems and facilities in recent years to make routes barrier-free. But it would be unfeasible to make all routes barrier-free, and there continues to be a great need for mobility support with IT technology as an alternative means of assistance. We have been researching to put Robotic Communication Terminals (RCT) into practice, which supports the three elementary behaviors of recognition, actuation, and information access, targeting almost all the pedestrians including elderly and disabled people with various types, levels, and duration of disabilities. The RCT consists of three types of terminals: "environment-embedded terminal", "user-carried mobile terminal", and "user-carrying mobile terminal". These terminals communicate with one another to provide the users with a comfortable means of mobility. This paper introduces our recent research progress.