최근 홈로봇에 대한 관심이 인공지능의 발전과 함께 급증하고 있다. 단순히 대화가 가능한 로봇이 아니라 소니의 아이보와 같은 펫로봇 형태를 비롯해 교육, 엔터테인먼트, 안내, 청소와 같은 각기의 세부적인 기능에 특화되어 있는 로봇들이 속속들이 우리 앞에 나타나고 있다. 한편, 클라우드기반의 인공지능 알고리즘과 음성인식을 이용한 AI스피커가 단순히 소리를 전달하는 기능을 뛰어넘어 명령을 알아 듣고 이를 실행하거나 이에 대한 답을 제공하는 기기로 진화하고 있다. 이러한 기능의 변화는 텍스트에서 그래픽유저인터페이스로 진화된 MMI(Man-Machine Interface)의 새로운 세대를 예고하고 있다. 본 연구에서는 홈로봇의 현황과 홈로봇에 적용될 ABI(Audio Base Interface, 음성기반인터페이스)로서 AI스피커에 대해서 고찰하고 있다.

Home robot arms require a payload of 2 kg to perform various household tasks; at the same time, they should be operated by low-capacity motors and low-cost speed reducers to ensure reasonable product cost. Furthermore, as robot arms on mobile platforms are battery-driven, their energy efficiency should be very high. To satisfy these requirements, we designed a lightweight counterbalance mechanism (CBM) based on a spring and a wire and developed a home robot arm with five degrees of freedom (DOF) based on this CBM. The CBM compensates for gravitational torques applied to the two pitch joints that are most affected by the robot’s weight. The developed counterbalance robot adopts a belt-pulley based parallelogram mechanism for 2-DOF gravity compensation. Experiments using this robot demonstrate that the CBM allows the robot to meet the above-mentioned requirements, even with low-capacity motors and speed reducers.

We propose and develop Home Security robot system based on Sensor Network (HSSN) configured by sensor nodes including radio frequency (RF), ultrasonic, temperature, light and sound sensors. Our system can acknowledge security alarm events that are acquired by sensor nodes and relayed in the hop-by-hop transmission way. There are sensor network, Home Security Mobile Robot (HSMR) and Home Server(HS) in this system. In the experimental results of this system, we presented that our system has more enhanced performance of response to emergency context and more speedy and accurate path planning to target position for arriving an alarm zone with obstacle avoidance and acquiring the context-aware information.