Kinematic performance enhancement of wheelchair-mounted robotic arm by adding a linear drive

Abstract

Wheelchair-Mounted Robotic Arms have been used to help impaired people to reach objects and perform essential activities in an autonomous way. Different available models are presented in this paper and a simple design is proposed to improve the kinematic performances of the integrated system in order to allow the user to increase its capability of interaction with home environment. To this end, a linear drive has been added to the Raptor model in order to move along the wheelchair. The benefit of the proposed development has been proved with a kinematic performance assessment procedure, which has analyzed critical points in the 3D space, providing 26% increase in performance with respect to the existing solution.