The rehabilitation robotic system FRIEND, which has been developed at the Institute of Automation consists of an electric wheelchair with mounted 6 DOF robot arm. The arm is connected to a multiprocessor PC, mounted on the backside of the wheelchair. As user interface an off the shelf speech recognition system is used.

For object detection and autonomous arm control the system is equipped with a moveable stereo-camera system and a gripper mounted camera.

The software integration and administration of the robot arm, the user interface and the sensors is realized by an agent-oriented multilayer control architecture.