A Motion Control of a Robotic Walker for Continuous Assistance during Standing, Walking and Seating Operation

This paper proposes a robotic walker system with standing, walking and seating assistance function. Our system focuses on domestic use for aged person who needs nursing in their daily life. Our key ideas are two topics. The first topic is combination of standing assistance function and walking assistance function. In previous works, many assistance devices are specialized in only "standing-up operation" or "walking operation". However, in their daily life, elderly people need standing, walking and seating assistance continuously by the same device. Therefore, our developing assistance system can support both operations by a small sized mechanism which is easy to use in the home. The second topic is a seating position adjustment assistance. From questionnaires of nursing specialists, a seating position adjustment requires the elderly people to walk backward and it is difficult operation for them. Furthermore, in many cases, a failure of this operation causes a fracture which has high risk to fall into bedridden life. Thus, our developing system can assist the aged users to adjust the seating position safety. The performance of our proposed system is verified by experiments using our prototype.