A Mobile Extendable Robot Arm: Singularity Analysis and Design

Inspection and maintenance of equipment inside buildings, such as exit signs, bared pipelines, air vents, and fire alarms often requires a robot to reach high, hidden, or confined areas that are difficult for humans to access. Even though these tasks are easy and repeatable, they are still not automated. The Mobile Extendable Robot Arm (MERA) is a movable robot arm with a novel 2-DOF scissor mechanism for reaching a high place and positioning an end-effector. MERA is composed of a locomotion vehicle with a rotation table and a 4-DOF extender arm, itself made of two layers of the 2-DOF scissor mechanism arranged in series. Placing the end-effector at an arbitrary point in space, the 4-DOF arm possesses two degrees of redundancy, allowing access to a point from various directions and enabling obstacle avoidance. In this paper, we present the design and analysis of the 2-DOF scissor mechanism. The 2-DOF scissor mechanism has two rotary actuators for driving the base links individually; consequently, the mechanism can elongate the entire body and tilt at the center of the base shaft. However, we found that the 2-DOF scissor mechanism had a singularity; after analyzing the singularity, we propose two novel solutions to the problem.