Paquitop.arm, a Mobile Manipulator for Assessing Emerging Challenges in the COVID-19 Pandemic Scenario

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.

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

“…The selected robotic arm is the Kinova Gen3lite, a six-degree-of-freedom manipulator with an onboard controller. The mounting position and orientation of the robotic arm with respect to the base platform have been deeply investigated in previous works [18,19]. As a result of those studies, the robotic arm is mounted in an off-centered position with respect to the base footprint of the platform.…”

“…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]. This paper describes all the sub-units of the project D.O.T.…”

Navigation Path Based Universal Mobile Manipulator Integrated Controller (NUMMIC)

“…Because of the mobile manipulator’s capability, various related studies are conducted on the premise that it is used at different fields. The many fields of application include industry [ 18 , 19 ], which is mentioned above, but also construction [ 20 ], agriculture [ 21 , 22 , 23 ], disaster [ 24 ], and healthcare [ 25 , 26 ].…”

Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance for Omnidirectional Mobile Manipulators

“…1-b), a novel service robot developed at Politecnico di Torino. Interested readers are addressed to [17,18] for further details. The remainder of the paper synthetically recalls the control algorithm, introduces the parameterization used for both robots and, at last, shows simulated results for a couple of application scenarios.…”