WaspL: Design of a Reconfigurable Logistic Robot for Hospital Settings
This addresses logistic inefficiencies in hospital settings by offering a versatile robot, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing robotic designs with added reconfigurability.
The paper tackled the problem of diverse logistic requirements in hospitals by developing WaspL, a reconfigurable robot that supports multiple modes like towing and forklifting, with experimental results validating its design capabilities.
Healthcare poses diverse logistic requirements, which resulted in the deployment of several distinctly designed robots within a hospital setting. Each robot comes with its overheads in the form of, namely, none/limited scaling, dedicated charging stations, programming interface, closed architecture, training requirements, etc. This paper reports on developing a reconfigurable logistic robot named WaspL. The design of WaspL caters to the requirement of high mobility, open robotic operating system architecture, multi-functionality, and evolvability features. It fulfills multiple logistics modes, like towing, lifting heavy payloads, forklifting low ground clearance objects, nesting of two WaspL} etc., fulfilling different applications required in hospital settings. The design requirements, mechanical layout, and system architecture are discussed in detail. The finite element modeling, attribute-based comparison with other standard robots, are presented along with experimental results supporting the WaspL design capabilities.