Development of a human-friendly walking assisting robot vehicle designed to provide physical support to the elderly

Up to now, the embodiment of bodily-kinaesthetic, perceptual and cognitive capabilities for assistive robots has been scarcely studied. The author has introduced the development of a human-friendly walking assist robot vehicle designed to provide physical support to the elderly. The proposed system is composed by two-wheeled inverted pendulum mobile robot, a 3-DOFs desktop haptic interface, a mobile computer and a wireless module for communication purposes. In this paper, the authors present further detailed experiments for verifying the stability of the whole system under static conditions. An improvement of the velocity control is introduced with a feedforward approach based on an optimal controller. Pilot experiments with seven healthy volunteers were carried out to validate the feasibility for physical support while walking on a dynamic scenario (e.g. a bump). From the experimental results, the proposed system was stabilized in about 30 seconds under a surface with low friction coefficient. On the other, we could validate the feasibility to provide physical support with the healthy volunteers in the simulated dynamic scenario. Finally, the error in the velocity was less when the two batteries were connected with the proposed velocity control method. (C) 2016, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.