Design and Safety Control of a High-Payload Nursing Robotic Arm with Tactile Skin

Service robots are being increasingly used to replace human beings in carrying out various sophisticated, heavy and even dangerous tasks. In order to solve the problem of labor shortage in the medical and nursing industry, this paper proposes a novel high-payload robotic arm for nursing tasks, which can help caregivers to lift and transfer patients. Firstly, we simulate and analyze the specific nursing tasks and application scenarios, and determine its kinematics configuration and load capacity parameters of each joint. Then we design and fabricate the modular and low flexibility robotic joints for the prototype. To avoid the occurrence of safety accidents while lifting patients, we design a new kind of tactile skin based on the resistance characteristic of varistor materials, using which a safety control algorithm is proposed. Experiments show that it can meet the requirements of load capacity and position control accuracy, and the proposed safety control method can effectively avoid many dangerous situations.