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A Novel Integrated Spoon-chopsticks Mechanism for a Meal Assistant Robotic System

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  • Robot and Applications
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Abstract

In order to help the disabled who have difficulty eating meals and to help their caretakers or family members, various types of meal assistant robots (MARs) have been developed worldwide in the last few decades. Some of them have been already commercialized. For these robotic systems, the eating utensil serves as an end-effector and plays a vital role, as it determines the type of food that MARs can handle. In addition, the eating utensils for MARs must be carefully designed while taking into consideration the local traditional culture and food culture. Most existing MARs developed by Western society are not suitable for Asian food, including the Korean one. Asian foods include various vegetables and steamed rice, and Asian people enjoy using chopsticks as well as spoons. In this paper, a novel integrated spoon-chopsticks mechanism was proposed. The proposed mechanism was integrated to the advanced MAR as its end-effector. The proposed mechanism was designed to change eating utensils and the operation of chopsticks with a single actuator. The kinematic solution to deal with this unique mechanism was also provided in this work. The feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed system have been verified after integrating it with MAR by a series of experiments.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Korea

    Rongwan Chen & Seong Young Ko

  2. Korea Electronics Technology Institute, Seongnam, Korea

    Tae-Keun Kim & Jung-Hoon Hwang

Authors
  1. Rongwan Chen
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  2. Tae-Keun Kim
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  3. Jung-Hoon Hwang
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  4. Seong Young Ko
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Seong Young Ko.

Additional information

This work was supported by the Industrial Strategic Technology Development Program (No. 20005096, Development of Intelligent Meal Assistant Robot with Easy Installation for the elderly and disabled) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE, Korea). We thank our research consortium including CyMechs Co., Korea Electronics Technology Institute, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Korea Institute of Industrial Technology, and Seoul National University Hospital, a lot for their support for this work.

Rongwan Chen received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Wenzhou University of Engineering, Zhejiang Province, China, in 2014. He worked as Mechanical Engineers in Zhejiang Tengen Electric Co., Ltd, and Hangzhou Yuanse Technology Co., Ltd. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree from Chonnam National University, Korea after graduating with a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering, in 2021, from the same institute. His research interests include meal assistant robots and medical instruments.

Tae-Keun Kim received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in the School of Mechanical Engineering from Korea University, Seoul, Korea, in 2010 and 2012, respectively. From 2012, he was a senior researcher in the Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI). His research interests include robot actuator, robot manipulator, mobile robot, and intelligent control.

Jung-Hoon Hwang received his B.S. degree in the Department of Mechanical Engineering from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 1997, and he received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in the Department of Mechanical Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea, in 1999, and 2007, respectively. From 2007, he was a senior researcher and is now a principal researcher and director of the Intelligent Robotics Research Center in the Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI), Gyeonggi, Korea. His research interests include robot intelligence, human-robot interaction, and robot mechanism design.

Seong Young Ko received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in the Department of Mechanical Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea, in 2000, 2002, and 2008, respectively. From 2009 to 2011, he was a research associate in the Mechatronics-In-Medicine Laboratory, the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College London, UK. From October 2011, he was an assistant professor and is now a professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Korea. His research interests include medical robotics, human-robot interaction, and intelligent control.

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Chen, R., Kim, TK., Hwang, JH. et al. A Novel Integrated Spoon-chopsticks Mechanism for a Meal Assistant Robotic System. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 20, 3019–3031 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-021-0520-3

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