**3.3.2 Mobility robots**

Robots for lifting people are applied at the homely environment to support people with immobility (elderly, patients or disabled) and their caregivers. Lifting is a basic activity of daily life, meaning it is an event that is indispensable for bathing, dressing, going onto the toilet and feeding. Patient transfer robots were in the focus of researchers and commercial developers since the beginnings of the research upon nursing in the 70s. Several types of transfer can be identified and various types of robots have been developed. Robots for lifting people from the bed, robotic wheelchairs and robotic walking frames are just a few basic examples to be named among a series of robotic patient transfer systems, which have been developed up to now. However, recently robotic technology is also applied to personal mobility following a "design for all" strategy. Toyota calls its next generation of downsized, personal, and electrical mobility devices like iREAL and i-Swing explicitly "Mobility Robots" and for that closely cooperates with top robotic researchers making these devices as intuitively controllable as possible. Further, also mobile suits as Toyota's i-foot and KAIST's HUBO-FX1 [23] belong to the category of mobility robots. Mobility Robots can be considered as a special type of mobile suits. They not only augment or multiply human power but they equip human beings with a completely new capability. Mobility robots can communicate with each other and the environment (car-to-x communication) and have a high potential for autonomous or autopilot control. Therefore, in our categorization we place mobility robots between Exoskelettons and fully autonomous Humanoids.
