CONTROL OF PATIENT CARE ROBOT "MELKONG"

摘要

The patient care robot "MELKONG" has been developed for lifting a patient from a hospital bed and transporting him/her in a semi-automatic way. The "MELKONG" is composed of two main parts. One is a manipulator for lifting the patient, and the other is a transportation mechanism capable of moving around in narrow spaces such as those in a hospital ward. The manipulator consists of two arms which are hydraulically driven in a pantograph link mechanism. In total, there are 7 DOF's, 3 for each arm and one for their base, which can rotate along a vertical axis. Each arm is equipped with a pair of forks at its wrist, and each outer fork has 2-dimentional force sensors at its tip. In order to lift a patient, the forks are inserted into specially designed beds, lifting the patient along with parts of the bed. The operator can move the two arms by using three kinds of input method: keyboard, joy-stick, and voice control. By using one of these methods, the tip of the forks are positioned at the end of the bed. Insertion is carried out automatically using the information from the sensors which is processed by two cpu's. ITRON, real-time OS, and another cpu have been adopted to carry out real-time tasks.