MINA: A Multitasking Intelligent Nurse Aid Robot

Abstract

Nurses have to carry out a myriad of tasks, which is one of the main reasons for burnout. In this paper, a robotic Multitasking Intelligent Nurse Aid (MINA) is proposed to assist nurses with everyday tasks and tackle nurse burnout. MINA uses Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) to map shelves in a storage room and pointcloud using an RGB-Depth camera. The barcode of the item is first detected using zbar library, and then the pointcloud is generated in ROS and saved accordingly. Preliminary experiments with respect to the creation of a pointcloud map with barcode detection are presented. The preliminary results reveal that the system shows a 100% barcode detection rate, and with each barcode detection a corresponding pointcloud map is generated and saved automatically without any intervention.