Robot assistant GARMI
GARMI is designed as a humanoid robot assistant for older people. It assists senior citizens with activities of daily living in their own homes, e.g. with housework, correspondence, internet searches or simple pick-up and delivery services. The humanoid can physically support a patient during rehabilitation exercises and even assist the doctor during the first steps of a telemedical visit. By equipping GARMI with measuring devices such as an ECG, blood pressure monitor and ultrasound, combined with the use of IoT sensors, the doctor has access to relevant health parameters so that they can act quickly in an emergency. This is possible in real time and is independent of the distance to the doctor's location. GARMI is also designed to improve interaction with family and friends by supplementing audiovisual communication with a haptic channel.
How we work with and on GARMI
In its test apartment, GARMI manages to assist a person for an entire day
- starting with helping them get out of bed in the morning,
- bringing and clearing the breakfast dishes,
- making phone calls to relatives and doctors,
- telemedical care in an emergency, including examination services such as ultrasound and
- carrying out rehabilitation measures, for example for shoulder problems.
The next steps: Together with Caritas nursing staff, GARMI faces new challenges in rooms that are unfamiliar to him. They will examine how well he is already coping in a different environment where, for example, every door handle is different, the cupboards are at different heights or the care trolleys are completely different models. And the care staff will report on how it feels to work with GARMI and what needs to be improved. GARMI's move to the campus is eagerly awaited by our interdisciplinary and international team. Because then GARMI can work side by side with students, care experts and older people to turn theory into reality every day.
Exemplary publications on GARMI
Introducing GARMI - A Service Robotics Platform to Support the Elderly at Home: Design Philosophy, System Overview and First Results: Click here for the paper.
Human-Inspired Audiovisual Inducement of Whole-Body Responses: Click here for the paper.
The most important facts about GARMI
GARMI offers natural and intuitive human-robot communication:
The robot assistant has a multimodal head equipped with sensors designed for intuitive communication. It is easy to operate via voice input and responds to questions posed to it in text mode via its large screen. Thanks to ChatGPT, a wide range of languages and Internet searches are possible.
GARMI offers safe and reliable operation:
Thanks to its full-body torque control, the development of GARMI ensures safe physical human-robot interaction from the outset. If a human or an unknown obstacle approaches, the robot slows down its movements until it comes to a complete stop, if necessary.
GARMI offers tactile telemedicine:
The assistance robot can be used to diagnose, rehabilitate and monitor the health of elderly patients.
Click here for the FAQ:
The most frequently asked questions about our assistance robot and working with it on our TUM campus are answered here.