A Chinese cooking robot for elderly and disabled people

Abstract

Cooking themselves is very important and difficult for elderly and disabled people in daily life. This paper presents a cooking robot for those people who are confined to wheelchairs. The robot can automatically load ingredients, cook Chinese dishes, take cooked foods out, deliver dishes to the table, self-clean, collect used ingredient box components, and so on. Its structure and interface is designed based on the barrier-free design principles. Elderly and disabled people can only click one button in the friendly Graphic User Interface of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to launch the cooking processes, and several classic Chinese dishes would be placed in front of them one after another within few minutes. Experiments show that the robot can meet their special needs, and the involved aid activities are easy and effective for elderly and disabled people.

Adaptive Robot-Assisted Feeding: An Online Learning Framework for Acquiring Previously Unseen Food Items

“…Food manipulation has been studied for various applications such as the packaging industry [11]- [16] with focus on the design of application-specific grippers for robust sorting and pick-and-place, as well as showing the need for visual sensing for quality control [17]- [19] and haptic sensing for grasping deformable food items without damaging them [11]- [16]. Research labs have also explored meal preparation [20], [21] as an exemplar multi-step manipulation problem, baking cookies [22], making pancakes [23], separating Oreos [24], and preparing meals [25] with robots. Most of these studies either interacted with a specific food item with a fixed manipulation strategy [22], [23] or used a set of food items for meal preparation which required a different set of manipulation strategies [25].…”

Physical-limits-constrained minimum velocity norm coordinating scheme for wheeled mobile redundant manipulators

“…, 6, their limitsφ ± l ,φ ± r , andθ ± i of the two-wheel-drive mobile six-joint manipulator synthesized by using the pseudoinverse approach (20) with w = −v∂H/∂ψ when the end-effector tracks the pentagram path. (a)φ l and limitsφ ± l ; (b)φ r and limitsφ ± r ; (c)θ 1 and limitsθ ± 1 ; (d)θ 2 and limitsθ ± 2 ; (e)θ 3 and limitsθ ± 3 ; (f)θ 4 and limitsθ ± 4 ; (g)θ 5 and limitṡ θ ± 5 ; (h)θ 6 and limitsθ ± 6 .…”

“…where 3 4 T , 4 5 T , and 5 6 T denote the homogeneous transform matrices. The homogeneous representation of the end-effector position vector in the world coordinate frame XYZ is…”

“…The derivation from (5) to 7is shown in this appendix. Specifically, we have homogeneous transform matrices,…”

“…Due to the coordinated work of a mobile platform and a manipulator, the mobile manipulator possesses more advantages than the fixed-platform manipulator, and has been applied in many fields, such as space exploration, 1, 2 special substance handling, 3 maintenance of equipment, 4 and household services. 5 Therefore, the planning and control of mobile manipulators has become an appealing and significant topic in the area of robotics, and has received increasing attention over the past years.…”