Development of a Robotic Arm for Handicapped People: A Task-Oriented Design Approach

In this paper, a task-oriented design (TOD) procedure is proposed by which a robotic arm can be designed to achieve predefined tasks. To define the target tasks, we have spent about six months, observing every-day life of disabled people, and have determined 12 important tasks. By using TOD procedure in a coherent and consistent manner, we have developed a working prototype of a care-providing robotic arm for physically disabled people. Through experiments, we confirmed that the developed robotic arm is indeed able to carry out the predefined tasks.