On the Suspension Design of Paquitop, a Novel Service Robot for Home Assistance Applications

Abstract

The general and constant ageing of the world population that has been observed in the last decade has led robotics researchers community to focus its aims to answer the ever-growing demand for health care, housing, care-giving, and social security. Among others, the researchers at Politecnico di Torino are developing a novel platform to enhance the performance offered by present-day issues, and to assess many others which were not even taken into consideration before they have been highlighted by the pandemic emergency currently in progress. This situation, in fact, made dramatically clear how important it is to have reliable non-human operators whom one can trust when the life of elderly or weak patients is endangered by the simple presence of other people. The platform, named Paquitop, features an innovative architecture conceived for omni-directional planar motion. The machine is designed for domestic, unstructured, and variously populated environments. Therefore, the mobile robot should be able to avoid or pass over small obstacles, passing through the capability to achieve specific person tracking tasks, and arriving to the need of operating with an high dynamic performance. Given its purpose, this work addresses the design of the suspension system which enables the platform to ensure a steady floor contact and adequate stability in every using condition. Different configurations of such system are then presented and compared through use-case simulations.

Evaluation of the Path-Tracking Accuracy of a Three-Wheeled Omnidirectional Mobile Robot Designed as a Personal Assistant

“…The popularity of vehicles using an omnidirectional motion system in the field of robotics is on the rise [1][2][3]. An omnidirectional motion is one of the principal requirements for mobile robots designed to operate in complex and unstructured environments in order to develop services such as workshop assistance [4], domestic [5] or home assistance [6] and health-care assistance [7]. The main benefit of an omnidirectional motion system is that it provides three degrees of freedom (DOFs) in a ground plane, allowing displacements in any direction while changing its orientation.…”

D.O.T. PAQUITOP, an Autonomous Mobile Manipulator for Hospital Assistance

“…On the other hand, the presence of a redundant set of actuators implies the need for a careful motion planning strategy, which must consider redundancy. A proper mechanical design of the wheel suspensions has been developed in order to guarantee steady contact with the floor and stability in all use conditions, even when the robot is passing over obstacles or is performing curved trajectories [16]. Figure 1 shows a schematic representation of the PAQUITOP prototype.…”

“…Even if all these categories can be generalized in the first one (Configuration I), it is interesting to examine these cases to understand their properties and to select the best strategy according to the needed performances. Regarding the kinematics analysis of the platform, the interested reader is addressed to [15,16]. For the D.O.T.…”

“…Towards assistive robotics, the researchers at Politecnico di Torino have proposed an innovative pseudo-omnidirectional platform, named PAQUITOP [15][16][17], which exploits a redundant set of actuators to achieve high mobility in the plane of motion using conventional wheels. Based on this mobile platform, a lightweight mobile manipulator has been proposed in previous works [18,19].…”

Toward Data-Driven Optimal Control: A Systematic Review of the Landscape

“…Applications of the DDMPC framework range from the mechatronics [120] to home assistance appliances [121]. The reader is referred to the following work [116], [122], [123] for details on the guarantees of the robustness of the DDMPC framework.…”