Development of the Research Platform of a Domestic Mobile Manipulator Utilized for International Competition and Field Test

• Main Authors: Yamamoto, Takashi, Terada, Koji, Ochiai, Akiyoshi, Saito, Fuminori, Asahara, Yoshiaki, Murase, Kazuto
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Hardware; Manipulators; Robot kinematics; Sensors; Software; Task analysis
• ISSN: 2153-0866
• DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2018.8593798

There has been an increasing interest in mobile manipulators that are capable of performing physical work in living spaces worldwide, corresponding to an aging population with declining birth rates with the expectation of improving quality of life (QoL). Research and development is a must in intelligent sensing and software which will enable advanced recognition, judgment, and motion to realize household work by robots. In order to accelerate this research, we have developed a compact and safe research platform, Human Support Robot (HSR), which can be operated in an actual home environment. We assume that overall R&D will accelerate by using a common robot platform among many researchers since that enables them to share their research results. Currently, the number of HSR users is expanding to 33 sites in 8 countries worldwide (as of February 15, 2018). Software and technical knowledge of all users is shared through a community website. HSR has been adopted as a standard platform for international robot competitions such as RoboCup@Home and World Robot Summit (WRS). HSR is provided to participants of those competitions through public offering. In this paper, we describe HSR's development background, and technical detail of its hardware and software. Specifically, we describe its omnidirectional mobile base using the dual-wheel caster-drive mechanism, which is the basis of HSR's operational movement and a novel whole body motion control system. Finally, we describe the results of utilization in RoboCup@Home and field tests in order to demonstrate the effect of introducing the platform.