Europe Bets on Robots to Help Care for Seniors
By 2020, Robosoft plans to produce annually 10,000 Kompaï robots, designed to assist seniors at home.
Source: Robosoft
Retiree Maurizio Feraboli taps a grocery list into a tablet and sends wheeled robots to retrieve food from a store near his apartment outside Pisa, Italy. His neighbor Wanda Mascitelli directs robots to grab the trash from her kitchen and drop it into a dumpster on her street. A robot also warns Mascitelli about a possible gas leak and later brings her a glass of water and a bottle of vitamins.
These scenes are from a video promoting the European research project Robot-Era, which recently concluded the world’s largest real-life trial of robot aides for the elderly. About 160 seniors in Italy and Sweden tested the robots during the four-year project, which received €6.5 million ($7.2 million) from the European Commission and €2.2 million from partners including Italian manufacturer Robotech and Apple supplier STMicroelectronics. Now Robot-Era manager Filippo Cavallo and fellow professors at the BioRobotics Institute at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies outside Pisa have started a company called Co-Robotics to commercialize the technology. “The robots in the video are ready” for more testing, says Cavallo, who plans to start selling them as soon as next year.