Development of Hair-washing Robot Equipped with Scrubbing Fingers

Abstract

We developed the world's first hair-washing robot equipped with scrubbing fingers. This robot assists in washing hair in hospitals or care facilities, and allows liability relief of healthcare professionals or care workers and higher quality of life for patients or members in need of nursing care. It features the mechanical and control technology for touching someone gently on the head, for instance, the self-aligning mechanism and the cylindrical rack mechanism of its end effector, the parallel link mechanism of its pressing arm, and the compliance control for providing appropriate sense of pressure.

Reactive motion planning for robotic manipulators and interaction control with deformable environment

“…The tree finger mechanism is attached on a seven-DOF Mitsubishi Heavy Industries PA-10 manipulator and is accompanied by a low-cost stereo vision camera for human body shape estimation. A multi-fingered robot [35] is also employed for washing hair in hospitals or care facilities. Several mechanisms with different end-effectors are controlled by compliance control, for providing an appropriate sense of pressure.…”