  Social assistance robots in health and elderly care have the potential to
support and ease human lives. Given the macrosocial trends of aging and
long-lived populations, robotics-based care research mainly focused on helping
the elderly live independently. In this paper, we introduce Robot DE NIRO, a
research platform that aims to support the supporter (the caregiver) and also
offers direct human-robot interaction for the care recipient. Augmented by
several sensors, DE NIRO is capable of complex manipulation tasks. It reliably
interacts with humans and can autonomously and swiftly navigate through
dynamically changing environments. We describe preliminary experiments in a
demonstrative scenario and discuss DE NIRO's design and capabilities. We put
particular emphases on safe, human-centered interaction procedures implemented
in both hardware and software, including collision avoidance in manipulation
and navigation as well as an intuitive perception stack through speech and face
recognition.
