The Robotic Gofer
The golden retreiver of robots promise to make life easier for those who lack
   mobility 
From: Popular Science - 09/2008 - page 36
By: Gregory Mone

El-E isn't ready to be your robo-butler, but it already plays a mean game of
fetch. Charlie Kemp, the director of the Georgia Institute of Technology's
Healthcare Robotics Lab, designed the new robot - its name is shorthand for
"Evelated Engagement" - to retreive objects for the elderly or
wheelchair-bound people. 

Three wheels, a single arm and hand, a set of cameras and laser range finder
enable the nearly six-foot-tall El-L to move around a room and grab phones,
perscription bottles, and eyeglasses. But its real utility lies in the basic
user interface, which makes it easy for anyone to control the 'bot. Just
shine an off-the-shelf green laser pointer for a few seconds on, say an
apple, and El-L's green-sensitive camera locates the spot. Then the robot
emits a "ding" so you know it has homed in. It uses another camera to
estimate the apple's position, drives over, and, after you confirm that it's
got the right object by shining the light again, El-L picks it up and brings
it whereever you tell it. 

The next step is to see whether people find El-L helpful and easy to use.
This summer, patients suffering from ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that
paralyzes muscles, tested the robot in Kemp's lab. Fetching objects seems
simple, Kemp says, but it's a fundamental step in robot evolution - and one
step closer to robo-maids. 

Links:
Charlie Kemp
http://www.charliekemp.com/

Healthcare Robotics
http://healthcare-robotics.com/

El-E: An Assistive Robot
http://www.hsi.gatech.edu/hrl/project_ele.shtml