Interactive robotic head for neck exercises

Abstract

Interactive robot heads are becoming more and more popular in these days and most of the tasks are replaced by robots in these days. As a solution for neck pain which has become a highly attentive illness nowadays due to use of new technological devices with wrong postures by humans, a humanoid robotic head which acts as an exercise instructor is discussed in this paper. The special features of this robot head are user identification and producing unique exercise patterns according to the user. After identifying the user, it can produce the past exercise recordings and the interactive session can be carried out by voice to voice conversation or keyboard inputs from the user. Kinematic Model and Inverse Kinematic Model are developed as discussed in this paper in order to get a more human like robot head with more human like movements. The mechanical structure is developed based on the biological data of a natural human neck. Neck mechanism and exercise instructor overall procedure with basic exercise modes are discussed in this paper. Communication with user, person identification systems, and getting visual feedback of the user movements are also described in this paper. This robot head can be further developed by adding more interactive features.