Healthcare personnel spend significant time and effort on repetitive tasks that imply physical labor. This leaves them with less time for social interaction with residents of, for example, elderly care homes.

IDLab-AIRO is proud to unveil MOBI, a mobile robot designed to enhance the quality of life for the elderly by autonomously delivering water, solving one of these repetitive tasks. The research and development of this robot is funded by a Flanders AI Research (FAIR) Program’s Enrichment Project.


With the research and development behind MOBI, we aim to achieve two goals. The first goal is to develop and deploy a mobile robot that can autonomously and safely navigate in elderly care homes. The second goal is to deliver water to the residents. To do this, we leverage our expertise in object perception, human-robot interaction, and motion planning. We accurately navigate, detect empty glasses, and refill them. While doing this, MOBI interacts with the elderly residents in a friendly and human-like manner (which is one of the FAIR research topics). MOBI supports interaction through natural speech, and will incorporate the ability to express itself in a human-like way.

The deployment of a mobile robot manipulation platform presents unique challenges, including ensuring its acceptance by residents and staff, adapting to human-driven environments, and prioritizing safety in complex settings. We continue to develop our mobile robot manipulation platform to tackle complex manipulation tasks in human-centric environments. We are continuously refining MOBI’s design and functionality to ensure its acceptance by residents and staff, prioritize safety, and seamlessly integrate into the daily routines of elderly care facilities.

In the future, the robot’s capabilities will be expanded to include more social interactions and helpful tasks such as cleaning, tidying, and feeding residents, ultimately working towards a general purpose robot butler.