WaspL: Design of a Reconfigurable Logistic Robot for Hospital Settings
Healthcare poses diverse logistic requirements, which resulted in the deployment of several distinctly designed robots within a hospital setting. Each robot comes with its overheads in the form of, namely, none/limited scaling, dedicated charging stations, programming interface, closed architecture, training requirements, etc. This paper reports on developing a reconfigurable logistic robot named WaspL. The design of WaspL caters to the requirement of high mobility, open robotic operating system architecture, multi-functionality, and evolvability features. It fulfills multiple logistics modes, like towing, lifting heavy payloads, forklifting low ground clearance objects, nesting of two WaspL etc., fulfilling different applications required in hospital settings. The design requirements, mechanical layout, and system architecture are discussed in detail. The finite element modeling, attribute-based comparison with other standard robots, are presented along with experimental results supporting the WaspL design capabilities.
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