Development of assistive robotic arm system with Robot Technology Middleware (RTM)

This paper presents the development of Robot Technology Components (RTCs) using RT-Middleware (RTM) for designing assistive robotic arms and human-machine interfaces (HMIs) that can be used by the disabled. RTM is an open software platform for a component-oriented robot system. An RTC is the basic functional unit for constructing a robot system using RTM. The interface definition for the basic functionality of RTCs is standardized by the Object Management Group (OMG). Therefore, software modules written as RTCs can be shared and reused in other robot systems. One feature of an assistive robotic arm is that the arm is controlled by manual operation. Various HMIs for manually operating the robotic arms have been developed according to the abilities of each user and the requirements regarding the actions that the robot can perform. These HMIs can be interchangeably connected to the assistive robotic arms by implementing the software modules for the robotic arm and the HMI as RTCs with a common software interface.