Introduction to the development of a robotic manipulator for nursing robot

Abstract

The structure and function system of a practical robotic manipulator applied to nursing robot has been developed. According to the development requirements of practicality and low cost, a 4-DOF lightweight manipulator was firstly designed. Then its kinematics model was established to obtain the forward and inverse kinematics solutions. As to the manipulator control system, CAN-bus architecture was utilized to implement communication between the main control system of robot and the joint control unit of manipulator. Taking the terminal gripper controller as an example, the modular circuit design and the concrete communication rules were emphatically introduced. Furthermore, based on the service task of grasping water cup, a series of core technical schemes on camera calibration and object location were put forward under the measurement condition of monocular vision to achieve visual servo control. The experimental results show that the manipulator can preliminarily realize the predetermined service functions. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.