Abstract
The continued development of HART (Human Assistive RoboT) is presented in this paper. HART has been designed and built by ART (Assistive Robot Team) in University of Hartford since 2017. To enable the robot to manipulate various control inputs of off-the-shelf vehicles with different sizes and structures in the market, HARTs mechanical design was focused on the achievement of kinematic re-scalability as its main technical design requirement. In this study, the mechanical design upgrade which can increase the robots power and dexterousness to control the steering wheel of the assigned vehicle is mainly described. For this, the third arm which is newly designed with passive joints and expendable links is built and added to HART. Next, HARTs new sensor head which is also redesigned for advancement of its perception capability is introduced in this paper. Lastly, the upgraded robot is tested and evaluated in human-centered environments which include both indoor and outdoor task spaces.