A telescopic robot arm design performing space-saving motion for autonomous mobile robots

The paper proposes a compact arm suitable for mounting on a mobile robot that can generate space-saving motions. Standard industrial and collaborative robotic arms are not suitable for mobile robots traveling anywhere in daily life. A robotic arm for mobile robots is required to have the following two compactness requirements. (1) The arm does not interfere with surroundings when it is not in use, such as running. (2) The arm does not interfere with the robot itself or surrounding obstacles while performing a task at a given location. We propose a design of a mobile robot arm with two telescopic links. The proposed arm has mechanisms for compactness, multi-stage expansion and contraction by a lead screw, and folding wires in the telescopic link shells. A primary motion generator is implemented to the proposed arm that moves the arm tip to the specified 3D position. Its 'small pass-through volume allows operation in confined spaces. The effectiveness of the proposed compact arm was verified by simulation and the actual prototype arm.