Featured Application: This novel robot could be applied in hospital, family and nursing home to help the elderly complete the basic daily activities and move patient autonomously.Abstract: Life care for disabled or semi-disabled elderly has become an increasingly common problem in society. In this paper, a novel wheelchair-stretcher assistive robot, which can meet the physiological needs of patients, is investigated and designed. The following tasks are conducted: (1) the mecanum wheel is adopted as the executive device of the walking mechanism, and its kinematics is analyzed in detail.(2) A five-link mechanism with single degree of freedom is proposed to realize the folding motion of the robot. Through the minimum conclusive area method, the optimal sizes of the armrests link and the side link are 507.9, and 332.5 mm, respectively. Based on the force analysis of the linkage mechanism, six torsion springs and RV (rotate vector) reduction motor are used as the driving device, which reduces the driving torque of the motor. (3) Based on the STM32 (STMicroelectronics 32-bits Microcontroller) chip, and combined with the theoretical analysis, the mechanical structure and the control system of the whole prototype are designed, and the feasibility of each module is verified by experimental research. The results confirm that the proposed robot has good performance, and that the control algorithm for the walking mechanism and the lifting mechanism are suitable.
This article adopts a 2-UPSþUP (U, P, and S are universal joint, the prismatic joint, and sphere joint, respectively) parallel mechanism as the leg mechanism of the quadruped walking robot based on the bionic concept and the motion capacity of the leg mechanism. The article investigates the kinematics (including the leg mechanism and the whole mechanism), gait planning, control, and experiment in detail. The following tasks are conducted: (1) designing the whole mechanism and developing the kinematics equations for both the leg mechanism and the whole mechanism; (2) planning the trotting gait and designing the foot trajectory based on the robot characteristics and conducting the kinematics analysis; (3) building the control system of the robot using self-developed controllers and drivers and studying the compound position control strategy; and (4) conducting the experiments for validating the controller, the compound position control strategy, the trotting pace, carrying capacity, and human-carrying walking. The results confirm that the proposed human-carrying walking robot has good performance and it is also verified that the controller and the compound position control strategy are suitable.
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