CoCoBot, A Low Cost Humanoid Robot Companion for Elderly People

The number of elderly people living alone is increasing every day due to the fact that the world’s population pyramid has undergone a severe aging process. One of the possible solutions to this problem is the use of companion robots to improve the life quality of these people. Currently, there are multiple solutions in the state of the art that allow to deal with this problem but the price of these robots is prohibitive. To solve this gap, it is necessary that research and development solutions focus on the development of cheaper robots. In this work, a new open source architecture is proposed to enable the development of low-cost companion robots. The proposed architecture consists of four layers: physical, reactive, deliberative and control. To reduce costs it is necessary to reduce the number of hardware devices and include more open source processing. For each layer we propose a series of basic open source modules needed to implement the common activities of a company robot. A minimum set of hardware devices is proposed for a low-cost robot.