The Design of Stretch: A Compact, Lightweight Mobile Manipulator for Indoor Human Environments
Abstract
Mobile manipulators for indoor human environments can serve as versatile devices that perform a variety of tasks, yet adoption of this technology has been limited. Reducing size, weight, and cost could facilitate adoption, but risks restricting capabilities. We present a novel design that reduces size, weight, and cost, while supporting a variety of tasks. The core design consists of a two-wheeled differential-drive mobile base, a lift, and a telescoping arm configured to achieve Cartesian motion at the end of the arm. Design extensions include a 1 degree-of-freedom (DOF) wrist to stow a tool, a 2-DOF dexterous wrist to pitch and roll a tool, and a compliant gripper. We justify our design with anthropometry and mathematical models of static stability. We also provide empirical support from teleoperating and autonomously controlling a commercial robot based on our design (the Stretch RE1 from Hello Robot Inc.) to perform tasks in real homes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2109.10892,
title = {The Design of Stretch: A Compact, Lightweight Mobile Manipulator for Indoor Human Environments},
author = {Charles C. Kemp and Aaron Edsinger and Henry M. Clever and Blaine Matulevich},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.10892},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
6 pages + refs, 9 figures. Published in peer-reviewed conference (ICRA 2022) with DOI 10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811922. Please cite like: [1] Charles C. Kemp, Aaron Edsinger, Henry M. Clever and Blaine Matulevich, "The Design of Stretch: A Compact, Lightweight Mobile Manipulator for Indoor Human Environments", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022