• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.1824-1832
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• 2011

In this paper, a smart home service robot McBot II is newly developed in much more practical and intelligent system than McBot I which we had developed a few years ago. Thus far, vacuum-cleaners have lightened the burden of household chores but the operational labor that vacuum-cleaners entail has been very severe. Recently, a cleaning robot was commercialized to solve but it also was not successful because it still had the problem of mess-cleanup, which pertained to the clean-up of large trash and the arrangement of newspapers, clothes, etc. Hence, we develop a new home mess-cleanup robot McBot II to completely overcome this problem on real environments. The mechanical design and the basic control of McBot II, which performs mess-cleanup function etc. in house, is actually focused in this paper. McBot II is mechanically modeled in the same method that the human works in door by using the waist and the hands. The big-ranged vertical lift and the shoulder joints to be able to forward move are mechanically designed for the operating function as the human's waist when the robot works. The mobility of McBot II is designed in the holonomic mobile robot for the collision avoidance of obstacle and the high speed navigation on the small area in door. Finally, good performance of McBot II, which has been optimally desinged, is confirmed through the experimental results for the control of the robotic body, mobility, arms and hands in this paper.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.487-495
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• 2012

In this paper, a Smart Home Service Robot, McBot II, which performs mess-cleanup function etc. in house, is designed much more optimally than other service robots. It is newly developed in much more practical system than McBot I which we had developed two years ago. One characteristic attribute of mobile platforms equipped with a set of dependent wheels is their omni- directionality and the ability to realize complex translational and rotational trajectories for agile navigation in door. An accurate coordination of steering angle and spinning rate of each wheel is necessary for a consistent motion. This paper develops trajectory controller of 3-wheels omni-directional mobile robot using fuzzy azimuth estimator. A specialized anthropomorphic robot manipulator which can be attached to the housemaid robot McBot II, is developed in this paper. This built-in type manipulator consists of both arms with 4 DOF (Degree of Freedom) each and both hands with 3 DOF each. The robotic arm is optimally designed to satisfy both the minimum mechanical size and the maximum workspace. Minimum mass and length are required for the built-in cooperated-arms system. But that makes the workspace so small. This paper proposes optimal design method to overcome the problem by using neck joint to move the arms horizontally forward/backward and waist joint to move them vertically up/down. The robotic hand, which has two fingers and a thumb, is also optimally designed in task-based concept. Finally, the good performance of the developed McBot II is confirmed through live tests of the mess-cleanup task.