Development of a Portable Compliant Dual Arm Robot

In this research, we aimed at designing a portable and safe dual arm robot to help people, especially for the elder or disable people in their daily life. With the consideration of portable, we limited the weight of the robot to be lower than 7 kg. The weight enables a person to lift the robot, even though by single arm. To overcome this challenging, most of the parts of the robot was designed to be manufactured by plastic. On the other hand, for the safety, we design a new type of passive compliant unit to sense the torque of the joint and buffer the impact of collisions. In each arm of the robot, there were six degrees of freedom, three in the shoulder and one in the elbow. In order to detect and buffer the impact of collision which occurred in any position of the arm, passive compliant unit was installed in both shoulder and elbow. In addition, there was also two degree of freedoms in the wrist joints for the robot to adjust the orientation of the end effector. In order to examine our design, the whole robot was manufactured by 3D printer with ABS material, except the motor, bearing and the screw. Finally, an experiment was conducted to test the proposed dual arm robot’s basic performance. The result showed that the payload of the robot was up to 500 g and the maximum reach is up to 400 mm. In addition, utilized the passive compliant units of the shoulder and elbow, the robot arm was able the buffering impact.