Abstract—Cleaning and massaging the head is a daily basic need of each person to ensure good health. This is especially important for patients whose immune system is weaker than the healthy people, this makes them vulnerable to external agents. Patients with difficult mobility have difficulty cleaning and washing themselves, they need the support from nurses and nursing staff, which can cause overcrowding in hospitals, especially as the world faces an aging population and COVID-19. Therefore, service robots applied to take care of patients have been increasingly interested in research. This paper proposed a serial manipulator that uses the pressure of a water jet to clean and massage the patient's head. A robot with 3 DOF creates a flexible trajectory so that the water jet can reach any point on the head. The robot is especially safe because it uses a water jet as the end-effecter instead of mechanical parts. The pressure impacting the scalp from water jet is varied by adjusting the water flow and the flow controller based on the fuzzy controller. The controller input variable is the variability between the measured flow value and the set flow value and returns the PWM pulse value to control the linear flow valve. Experimental results show the reliability of the flow fuzzy controller. The system's response signal is no overshoot as well as low error and the response time is fast enough.

Index Terms—sphere robot, massage robot, shower robot, fuzzy controller, water jet

Cite: Nguyen Tran Trung Hieu and Nguyen Truong Thinh, "Controlling Water Jet Based on Fuzzy Controller for Cleaning and Massage Patient’s Head," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 11, No. 9, pp. 646-652, September 2022. DOI: 10.18178/ijmerr.11.9.646-652

Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.