A Self-Feeding Assistive Robotic Arm for People with Physical Disabilities of the Extremities

This paper describes a self-feeding assistive robotic arm for people with severe disabilities. In order to obtain humanlike arm movements during meals, we made and tested a robotic arm with 7-DoF (degree of freedom). A robotic arm simulator was also used to obtain motions for the real 7-DoF robotic arm. Using the robotic arm system, we performed two experiments: (1) task to transfer water from a bowl to the other and (2) task to eat foods. It is found from the experimental results that the robotic arm system can transfer more than 80 % of water and food to the respective positions.