Flexible, Personal Service Robot for ALS Patients * Diseases that cause motor impairment leave people dependent on the help of caregivers or new technologies for their daily tasks. Care robots could support these patients and help them gaining autonomy in some of their daily activities. In this paper, a robotic assistant is introduced based on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis patients requests for care robotics. The presented use cases are derived from their feedback and integrated using a compliant lightweight robotic arm. The system has been developed to be used independently from the input device owned by the patient, which grants an easy access to the robot without any special training. The system is flexible enough to not harm the patient for tasks that involve physical humanrobot interaction, and yet precise enough to manipulate different objects. Despite the increasing acceptance of care robots in the community nowadays, the robotic assistant is one of the few robot solutions that combines autonomous behaviors and teleoperated control.

SMOOTH Robot: Design for a Novel Modular Welfare Robot Demographic change is expected to challenge many societies in the next few decades if todaysxe2x80x99 standards of services in e.g. elder care shall be maintained. Robots are considered to at least partially mitigate this challenge, however, robots are rarely applied in the welfare domain. This paper describes the development of a concept for a novel welfare robot that is modular and affordable. The development is based on a participatory design process and by taking strengths and limitations of selected, commercially available robots into account. This work contributes a design methodology specific for welfare robots and a resulting robot concept that address three use cases in a care center. The concept includes multimodal robot perception that facilitates a proactive robot behavior for achieving smooth interactions with endusers.