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Background Building control architecture that balances the assistive manipulation systems with the benefits of direct human control is a crucial challenge of human–robot collaboration. It promises to help people with disabilities more efficiently control wheelchair and wheelchair-mounted robot arms to accomplish activities of daily living. Methods In this study, our research objective is to design an eye-tracking assistive robot control system capable of providing targeted engagement and motivating individuals with a disability to use the developed method for self-assistance activities of daily living. The graphical user interface is designed and integrated with the developed control architecture to achieve the goal. Results We evaluated the system by conducting a user study. Ten healthy participants performed five trials of three manipulation tasks using the graphical user interface and the developed control framework. The 100% success rate on task performance demonstrates the effectiveness of our system for individuals with motor impairments to control wheelchair and wheelchair-mounted assistive robotic manipulators. Conclusions We demonstrated the usability of using this eye-gaze system to control a robotic arm mounted on a wheelchair in activities of daily living for people with disabilities. We found high levels of acceptance with higher ratings in the evaluation of the system with healthy participants.

Recent technological advances enable gripper-equipped robots to perform many tasks traditionally associated with the human hand, allowing the use of grippers in a wide range of applications. Depending on the application, an ideal gripper design should be affordable, energy-efficient, and adaptable to many situations. However, regardless of the number of grippers available on the market, there are still many tasks that are difficult for grippers to perform, which indicates the demand and room for new designs to compete with the human hand. Thus, this paper provides a comprehensive review of robotic arm grippers to identify the benefits and drawbacks of various gripper designs. The research compares gripper designs by considering the actuation mechanism, degrees of freedom, grasping capabilities with multiple objects, and applications, concluding which should be the gripper design with the broader set of capabilities.

Abstract. Parallel mechanisms with reduced Degree Of Freedom (DOF) have grown in importance for industry and researchers as they o er a simpler architecture and lower manufacturing/operating costs with great performance. In this paper, a two-degree-offreedom parallel robot is proposed and analyzed. The robot with a xed base, a moving platform, and three legs achieve translational and rotational motions through actuation on prismatic and revolute joints and can be applied to pick-and-place applications, vehicle simulators, etc. Through homogeneous transformation matrices and Sylvesters dialytic elimination method, a closed-form solution for direct kinematics is obtained for all possible assembly modes. Inverse kinematics is solved by the closed-form solution as well. This greatly decreases computational time, suggesting the optimality of the proposed approach. A case study is investigated to validate the solutions found and is compared with a CAD model to corroborate the obtained results. Finally, a workspace calculation is carried out for di erent geometrical parameters of the robot.