Extendable Pantograph Arms

When designing a robot to interact with people, the decision to incorporate a robot arm may arise. In this paper, we investigate adding an inexpensive, functional arm to our mobile CoBot service robots. Specifically, we examine two-dimensional extendable pantograph arms for CoBot. Pantograph arms have intuitive kinematics and inverse kinematics. Pantograph arms are modular and adding additional linkages corresponds to simple changes in the kinematic calculations. These arms have several advantages (and disadvantages) compared to traditional robot arms. A prototype pantograph arm is currently in development and our goal is to attach a modular pantograph arm to CoBot to perform simple needed tasks, such as knocking on doors and pressing elevator buttons.