Preliminary Observations for Functional Design of a Mobile Robotic Manipulator

This paper presents the first steps approached for the functional design of a mobile robotic manipulator conceived for home assistance. The main characteristic of the mobile platform is that of owning an innovative architecture conceived to enhance the dynamics performance offered by the present-day solutions for omni-directional planar motions. The mobile robot, named Paquitop.arm, is aimed at working in a domestic unstructured environment and it has been designed to mainly perform monitoring activities. The variety of tasks to whom it can be devoted significantly increases if an on-board manipulation ability is installed. Due to that, it is worth investigating what aspects could be to be considered while designing such a mobile manipulator. The manuscript approaches a simplified kinematics analysis to define the most relevant parameters necessary for implementation of a commercial robot arm on the customized mobile platform Paquitop.