CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF DEVELOPMENT OF LEG MASSAGE SETUP USING MICROBOT TEACHMOVER

Abstract

In this thesis, an attempt is made to develop Robot Massage experimental setup for leg using robotic arm available in the servo lab of our department. The task under consideration was massaging automatically the leg of the patient in order to reduce the pain. The manipulator has been used to press the muscles from ankle to the knee that is to track the trajectory and to grasp the leg or press using its tool. TeachMover (five axis articulated robot) is used for this purpose. The control has been applied to a task, representing leg model, which can be easily extended to real leg massage problem. The model is frustum shape which approximates real leg. The trajectory is linear one, which is the line between the two end points of the frustum or which the robot should massage. Three different sensors that are encoders; mounted at each joint of the robot with six degrees of freedom, a calibrated camera and a grip switch; mounted at the wrist of the manipulator were used. The grip switch is a binary sensor which gives an output if the pressure between the hands (Gripper) of the robot exceeds 13 Newtons. Computer Vision is an active research area in which camera calibration is a very important problem. The aim of the camera calibration is to estimate internal and external camera parameters. The camera is calibrated, based on the algorithm proposed by Qiang Ji et. al [1]. Totally seven control points are used for estimating internal and external camera parameters. Special markers for the purpose of identifying the control points were used. The distance between camera and the robot is fixed. By estimating the position and orientation of the object which is the frustum model, the linear trajectory is found which the robot follows. The results show feasibility of the use of the above mentioned approach and are interpreted in chapter 5. The algorithm works satisfactorily with wide range of varying parameters i.e. the position and orientation of the