Design and Safety Control of a HighPayload Nursing Robotic Arm with Tactile Skin Service robots are being increasingly used to replace human beings in carrying out various sophisticated, heavy and even dangerous tasks. In order to solve the problem of labor shortage in the medical and nursing industry, this paper proposes a novel highpayload robotic arm for nursing tasks, which can help caregivers to lift and transfer patients. Firstly, we simulate and analyze the specific nursing tasks and application scenarios, and determine its kinematics configuration and load capacity parameters of each joint. Then we design and fabricate the modular and low flexibility robotic joints for the prototype. To avoid the occurrence of safety accidents while lifting patients, we design a new kind of tactile skin based on the resistance characteristic of varistor materials, using which a safety control algorithm is proposed. Experiments show that it can meet the requirements of load capacity and position control accuracy, and the proposed safety control method can effectively avoid many dangerous situations.

Obstacle Avoidance using a Capacitive Skin for Safe HumanRobot Interaction. The paper describes a control framework using a capacitive skin for advanced and safe humanrobot interactions. The skin consists of high density capacitive sensors which are able to detect objects at close distance. We propose a multitask kinematic control scheme which manages at once the control task of the endeffector and the obstacle avoidance task by using the capacitive skin measurements. To solve the multiobjective problem, a WeightPrioritized solution based on a QP formalism is adopted. The robustness of the kinematic controller is enhanced by adding a local joint reconfiguration when the robot moves close to a singularity. Experimental results on manipulator arm equipped with the capacitive sensors are presented in realistic situations of humanrobot interactions.