Design and Integration of Person Carrying Robot

The goal for this project was to build a mobile robot that could carry a person and navigate autonomously.

Starting almost from scratch, I chose the sensors, computers, and servo drives for the robot. I chose EtherCAT as the communication protocol to achieve realtime speeds with high bandwidth and integrated it into the ROS ecosystem to easily integrate off-the-shelf sensors (e.g., Lidar and cameras). Moreover, I used ros-control to seemlesly transition from simulation in Gazebo to real robot experiments. I open-sourced my code on GitHub and provide design and implementation details in (Gonzalez et al., 2023).

First prototype as we tested moving in straight lines: up, right, and down.

References

2023

ASME-IDETC

Design of a Person-Carrying Robot for Contact Compliant Navigation

Carlos Gonzalez, Samantha Lee, Francisco Montano, and 5 more authors

In Proceedings of the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference, 2023

DOI Bib

@inproceedings{Gonzalez2023ASME,
  author = {Gonzalez, Carlos and Lee, Samantha and Montano, Francisco and Ortega, Steven and Kang, Dong Ho and Jaiswal, Mehar and Jiao, Junfeng and Sentis, Luis},
  title = {Design of a Person-Carrying Robot for Contact Compliant Navigation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ASME} International Design Engineering Technical Conference},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.1115/DETC2023-117215},
}