Mobile robot for door opening in a house

Abstract

A new field of robot applications is emerging. Owing to the relevancy of the robot, people’s convenience can be enhanced. In this paper, we study on the task of opening a closed door by the home service robot which is mobile robot equipped with a manipulator. The objective of this research is to successfully accomplish door opening task using the home service robot. In addition, the robot has some advantages as the home service robot for the general use. The proposed robot is small and compact because double active universal joint is adopted for the robotics joint mechanism of the manipulator so it easy to move in a house through doorways. Moreover, cheap force sensors are employed for the information of door opening task instead of expensive JR3 sensor so we can expect cost effectiveness in the robot. Practical experiment has shown that the door opening task can be completed successfully by the proposed home service robot which is small, compact, inexpensive but efficient.