Abstract
Teleoperated mobile manipulators are of use for disabled people and for the wider public interested in acting at distance. The high price of existing devices is a barrier to their diffusion. The paper reports on the first design produced in the Cheap Arm Project (CHAP). It costs less than £2000, uses easily available parts and can be assembled by anybody with basic technical skills. The manipulator can reach objects from floor-level up to shelves at a height of 170 cm using a new low-cost arm design. Teleoperation is be done using a tablet, smartphone or browser. The cost could be further reduced by using different servo motors. The design and assembly instructions are made available on the open-source repository GitHub, with the hope that the community will build and improve the design. The first version has been tested in a college for disabled young people who provided initial recommendations for improvement.
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Notes
- 1.
We approximate g = 9.81 with 10.
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Project source files: https://mobile-chap.github.io/Web/
Acknowledgment
We gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Parag Khanna to the design of the gripper and that of Arunaganesan Swaminathan to the design of the base and its control.
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Bugmann, G., Cassidy, D., Doyle, P., Singh Mann, K. (2017). An Open-Source Tele-Operated Mobile Manipulator: CHAP V1. In: Gao, Y., Fallah, S., Jin, Y., Lekakou, C. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10454. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64107-2_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64107-2_16
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