A time will come, when mothers will stop yelling at kids for not doing their chores. Thanks to the new house-help, all work will be done in a jiffy. Elves live in fairyland so in the real world moms will get help from the hardworking robots. Care-O-bot 3 is the prototype of a service robot that has been designed to help lazybones do all the work at home. The 1.45 meters high bot was developed by research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart. Care-O-bot 3 is fitted with numerous sensors and Stereovision color cameras; laser scanners and a 3-D range camera enable it to chronicle its surroundings in three dimensions in real time. So in case you come too close, the arm just stops moving. To top it all of, this robot can move in any direction. "This is made possible by an omnidirectional platform with four separately steered and driven wheels," explains Birgit Graf, who heads the domestic and personal service robotics group at IPA. "In this way, the robot can even pass safely through narrow places in an apartment." Care-O-Bot has a tray mounted on its front to carry various items. The tray also has a touch screen LucidTouch-Profile Feb-08 through which it can be controlled. The robot also recognizes voice commands and responds to gestures.

The new Care-O-bot has a highly flexible arm with seven degrees of freedom and a hand with three fingers. This enables it to pick up bottles, cups and similar objects and to operate machines. Force sensors prevent it from gripping too hard. Schunk developed the arm and the grippers.

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