Wheeled Mobile Robots: State of the Art Overview and Kinematic Comparison Among Three Omnidirectional Locomotion Strategies.

In the last decades, mobile robotics has become a very interesting research topic in the field of robotics, mainly because of population ageing and the recent pandemic emergency caused by Covid-19. Against this context, the paper presents an overview on wheeled mobile robot (WMR), which have a central role in nowadays scenario. In particular, the paper describes the most commonly adopted locomotion strategies, perception systems, control architectures and navigation approaches.

Electomyographic activities of shoulder muscles during Handwheelchair.Q vs pushrim wheelchair propulsion.

Different mechanisms of force transmission have been developed for the movement of wheelchairs, from the standard pushrim propulsion to the handbike. Contributing to this repertoire, we recently developed a system of propulsion based on a pulley-cable mechanism, the Handwheelchair.Q.

Marvin: An Innovative Omni-Directional Robotic Assistant for Domestic Environments.

Population aging and pandemics have been shown to cause the isolation of elderly people in their houses, generating the need for a reliable assistive figure. Robotic assistants are the new frontier of innovation for domestic welfare, and elderly monitoring is one of the services a robot can handle for collective well-being. Despite these emerging needs, in the actual landscape of robotic assistants, there are no platforms that successfully combine reliable mobility in cluttered domestic spaces with lightweight and offline Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions for perception and interaction.

Prototyping of manual wheelchair with alternative propulsion system.

This paper presents the study, design and prototyping of a manual wheelchair, named handwheelchair.q, with an innovative propulsion's system. The research is based on a novel system of propulsion that is more efficient and ergonomic than the hand rim one.