Abstract
The use of automation and robotics technologies for caregiving and assistance has become a very interesting research topic in the field of robotics. The spread of COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of social distancing in hospitals and health centers, and collaborative robotics can bring substantial improvements in terms of sparing health workers basic operations. Thus, researchers from Politecnico di Torino are working on Paquitop.arm, a mobile robot for assistive tasks. The purpose of this paper is to present a system composed of an omnidirectional mobile platform, a 6 DOF robot arm, and a depth camera. Task-oriented considerations are made to estimate a set of mounting parameters that represents a trade-off between the exploitation of the robot arm workspace and the compactness of the entire system. To this end, dexterity and force transmission indexes are introduced to study both the kinematic and the static behavior of the manipulator as a function of the mounting parameters. Finally, to avoid singularities during the execution of the task, the platform approach to the task workspaces is studied.
Highlights
In the last decades, many researchers in the robotic field have investigated assistive robotics, developing several mobile robotic platforms conceived to help weak or non-selfsufficient subjects [1,2,3]
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the importance of social distancing, especially in those structures, such as geriatric wards and hospices, where patients are endangered by closeness to other people [4]
The Kinova Gen3 lite arm is a serial collaborative manipulator with six revolute joints (6R). This category of manipulators has a maximum number of 16 different solutions for a given pose, as demonstrated by Pimrose [18] and Lee et al [19] and used by Zohour et al [20] to solve the Inverse Kinematic Problem (IKP) of Kinova Gen3 lite; this number can possibly be reduced by the joint mobility constraints
Summary
Many researchers in the robotic field have investigated assistive robotics, developing several mobile robotic platforms conceived to help weak or non-selfsufficient subjects [1,2,3]. A widely used approach of redundant locomotion involves omni-wheels, whose correct functioning strictly depends on the evenness of the ground and on the materials of which they are made [10] These are the premises that led researchers at Politecnico di Torino to develop an innovative mobile platform, named Paquitop [11,12], as the base modular frame for indoor robotized assistance applications. Aside from providing sufficient mechanical resistance to the static and dynamic inputs coming from the system’s motion, the structure must position the arm base so that the equilibrium of the system is as independent as possible from the co-bot posture This fact is of great importance as the Paquitop platform and manipulator masses are comparable; the center of mass of the system strictly depends on the robot mounting position and orientation. It was preliminarily shown that the range of possible configurations available for obstacle avoidance varies with the mounting configuration of the arm and that such configurations can be exploited by modifying the mutual pose of the mobile robot with respect to the target
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