Paquitop.arm, a Mobile Manipulator for Assessing Emerging Challenges in the COVID-19 Pandemic Scenario

first_pagesettings Open AccessArticle Paquitop.arm, a Mobile Manipulator for Assessing Emerging Challenges in the COVID-19 Pandemic Scenario by Giovanni Colucci *ORCID,Luigi Tagliavini,Luca Carbonari,Paride CavalloneORCID,Andrea BottaORCID andGiuseppe Quaglia *ORCID Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino, Italy * Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed. Academic Editor: Marco Ceccarelli Robotics 2021, 10(3), 102; https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics10030102 Received: 29 June 2021 / Revised: 10 August 2021 / Accepted: 11 August 2021 / Published: 14 August 2021 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Service Robotics against COVID-2019 Pandemic) Download PDF Browse Figures Citation Export Abstract The use of automation and robotics technologies for caregiving and assistance has become a very interesting research topic in the field of robotics. The spread of COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of social distancing in hospitals and health centers, and collaborative robotics can bring substantial improvements in terms of sparing health workers basic operations. Thus, researchers from Politecnico di Torino are working on Paquitop.arm, a mobile robot for assistive tasks. The purpose of this paper is to present a system composed of an omnidirectional mobile platform, a 6 DOF robot arm, and a depth camera. Task-oriented considerations are made to estimate a set of mounting parameters that represents a trade-off between the exploitation of the robot arm workspace and the compactness of the entire system. To this end, dexterity and force transmission indexes are introduced to study both the kinematic and the static behavior of the manipulator as a function of the mounting parameters. Finally, to avoid singularities during the execution of the task, the platform approach to the task workspaces is studied.