An Intelligent Assistive Robotic Manipulator

This paper presents the design of an automatic and intelligent robot arm for object grasping for people on wheelchair with mild to severe disabilities. The system is equipped with stereovision detection in order to distinguish different objects from the background. The robot arm has been designed with 6 degrees of action to grasp the detected object from the floor and bring it in front of the user. Two precalibrated digital cameras, facing downward, simultaneously take pictures of the surface where the object is located. Then by applying a new and robust 3D object detection method, the height, location and orientation of the object with respect to the robot's base point are found. The resulting rotation periods are transferred through a designated electronic driver board to the joints' motors via the PC parallel port. Overall, the system detects the object, moves the robot arm to the location of the object, grasps it, moves it to a predefined position in front of the user, releases the object and finally returns to its home position. The system is automatic and is operated by only one command.