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

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 ute...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of control, automation, and systems 2022, Automation, and Systems, 20(9), , pp.3019-3031
Main Authors: Chen, Rongwan, Kim, Tae-Keun, Hwang, Jung-Hoon, Ko, Seong Young
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Actuators
Commercialization
Control
Eating
End effectors
Engineering
Food
Kitchen utensils
Meals
Mechatronics
Regular Paper
Robotics
제어계측공학
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1598-6446
2005-4092
DOI:10.1007/s12555-021-0520-3