Development of RT-Component for Assistive Robotic Arm and Man-Machine Interface Using OpenRTM-aist

摘要

This paper presents the development of RT-Components for assistive robotic arm and man-machine interface with RT-Middleware for disabled patients. RT-Middleware is an open software platform for component-oriented robot system development. The RT-Component is a basic functional unit for constructing a robot system on RT-Middleware. The specification of the RT-Component is standardized in OMG. Therefore the RT-Component can be shared and reused in other robot systems. One feature of a life support robot is that the robot is operated by a human. Therefore a man-machine interface plays an important role for operating the life support robot. Various man-machine interfaces for operating the life support robots have been developed and customized according to the condition and remaining function of the patients. These man-machine interfaces can be connected to the life support robot in the same fashion by making the software modules for the robots and the man-machine interfaces as RT-Component. This paper shows the RT-Components for an assistive robotic arm and a man-machine interface. The robotic arm component receives joint angle velocity or hand velocity as a motion command of the arm from the man-machine interface component, and send the current joint angles to the man-machine interface component via a DataPort. The other basic commands for operating the assistive robotic arm are defined in a ServicePort. We developed RT-Components of several types of robotic arm, and man-machine interface. Any combination of the arm components and the man-machine interface components could be connected in the same fashion.