Development of Robotic ARM for People with Upper Limb Disabilities by AIST
From Honda’s Walking assist Exoskeleton to Tail-wrist-II robotic arm developed by Tokyo Institute of Technology is becoming apparent that the successful development and commercialization of life supporting type robotic technology requires full human participation. Based on this fundamental concept AIST (Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) has developed a small and light weight robotic arm featuring double sensors and communication technology and so on. The newly developed RAPUD which is designed to assist individuals with upper limb disabilities features a seven degree of freedom in arm and hand and it weighs 6 kg capable of carrying payload of 0.5 kg.
The RAPUD incorporates a linear expansion and contraction mechanism using a continuum of blocks to help to increase the field of vision of its user during its operation resulting at the same time in a reduced number of joints of arm. The accompanying sensors in RAPUD provide ability in measuring joint movements in addition to highly reliable communication system. The RAPUD evaluation has been carried out by individuals suffering form muscular dystrophy or cervical spine damage. The RAPUD comes with a small CPU board specifically developed for the robot with various output interfaces like LAN, USB, a serial port and digital input and output. Furthermore, the RAPUD’S three dimensional vision system comes with a small stereo camera on its arm plus an RT component that helps the arm to grasp objects by detecting their position and posture after observing them. The camera equipped with a 1/3-inch CMOS image sensor with a frame rate of 7.5 fps (VGA) with a progressive scan mode. As for the control interface, RAPUD can be easily operated using a small joystick an automatic scan-type input panel with a single switch, and a general-purpose keypad. RAPUD is based on open architecture using base technology such as RT middle-ware.
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[...] Robotic research and development has been labeled as being highly inefficient, all due to the isolated nature of development, where each organization has developed all its related software from scratch. To make the matter worst, lack of compatibility and standard interfaces among systems prevents compatibility between developed resources without an explicit design, requiring a lot work for previously developed software reuse, which has resulted in an increased in overall cost of robotic system development, making it a major factor in dampening robots commercial viability. To address this issue major research program in many industrialized countries around the world are focusing on software platforms for robotic development. One such effort has been taken by AIST (Advance Industrial Science and Technology), by developing OpenRTM-aist. OpenRTM-aist is a software platform that allows efficient development of robotic system through modularization of functional elements of robots, such as sensors, motors, robot arms as well as entire mobile robots on a software level, with as aim to improve reliability and reusability of the software. The interface specification of an RT component which is the modular atomic unit of software in the middleware is based on the Robotic Technology Component (RTC) specification ver.1.0, which has been adopted by OMG (Object Management Group) as an official standard specification, making the OpenRTM-aist the world’s first implementation based on the OMG RTC specification. The key points in OpenRTM-aist are, providing interoperability among operating systems, programming languages and vendors based on compliance with international standards, providing dual licensing, an open source license and individual licenses. This research has been under METI and NEDO 5-year “Intelligent Robot Technology Software” project which has started in 2007. Share and Enjoy: [...]