Minimal Degree of Freedom Dual-Arm Manipulation Platform with Coupling Body Joint for Diverse Cooking Tasks

This paper introduces the kinematic configuration, kinematic analysis, workspace analysis of a dual-arm manipulation platform intended for varied cooking applications. Based on the analysis of different essential cooking tasks, each arm was designed to have 5 degrees of freedom (DOFs) independently with an additional single DOF located at the center of the linkage connecting the two arms. The additional actuator expands the reachable workspace as well as the common workspace between the two arms. Furthermore, the additional joint optimizes the arm’s joint configuration for cooking tasks by giving the arm a redundant pitch joint. This allows the ends of each arm to be able to produce linear planar trajectories which are important for many precise cooking actions. The system will also be able to multitask, being able to simultaneously perform potentially disparate tasks in different areas of its workspace. Besides these advantages, we expect that this dual-arm system will be more computationally and cost-efficient than similar systems using higher DOF arms.