HandAid: A Seven DoF Semi-Autonomous Robotic Manipulator

For a person with only one arm, it is not very easy to grasp objects from their surroundings. Human beings have evolved to use both hands to carry out even ordinary tasks. Hence, specially-abled people with only one hand suffer difficulties in their day to day life. We present the development of HandAid, equipment designed to assist single-handed people. HandAid is a semi-autonomous device consisting of a redundant robotic manipulator attachment that can be attached to the shoulder and serves as a prosthetic arm to aid the user. The arm solely cannot identify the object to interact with; hence it is assisted by a headgear containing a stereo-camera and a laser pointer. The user can move his head and guide the laser to the concerned object, the located object is extracted using segmentation, and the point cloud of the object is created to obtain the collision-free path which is traced by the arm to grasp the object. This novel concurrent approach is implemented on ROS, integrated with OpenCV and moveit! for precise recognition and efficient manipulation of the object. Besides, the bot has been simulated on the gazebo to validate the results.