Kinematics and Control of a Housekeeping Robot Assistant

In this paper, the compliant controller of a new service mobile robot designed for cleaning tasks and its kinematic modelling is addressed. Robot systems usage in home environment has been exponential increased in the last years thus placing a central importance on making interaction between people and machine as natural as possible. The main focus of this paper is twofold. First, the forward kinematics of the robot will be presented in order to introduce the closed form solution of the inverse kinematics problem. Second, the closed form solution will be used in the the design of a new kind of hybrid force/position control algorithm. The most important improvements of this control law are the flexibility and the simplicity. The compliant motion performed by this controller allows the robot to execute interaction tasks both with the environment and with the user and this make it easy to be used by non-experts. A table cleaning and a path teaching are two example of such a kind of tasks that will be performed from the robot in order to validate experimentally the results of the paper.