WaspL: Design of a Reconfigurable Logistic Robot for Hospital Settings

Abstract

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.