Abstract
Crawling is a fundamental skill linked to development far beyond simple mobility. Infants who have cerebral palsy and similar conditions learn to crawl late, if at all, pushing back other elements of their development. This paper describes the development of a robot (the Self-Initiated Prone Progression Crawler V3, or SIPPC3) that assists infants in learning to crawl. When an infant is placed onboard, the robot senses contact forces generated by the limbs interacting with the ground. The robot then moves or raises the infant’s trunk accordingly. The robot responses are adjustable such that even infants lacking the muscle strength to crawl can initiate movement. The novel idea that this paper presents is the use of a force augmenting motion mechanism to help infants learn how to crawl.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the following individuals for their contributions to this research: Brandon Boos, Rebecca Browder, Steven Grissom, Zac Morris, Johnny O’Keefe, Amanda Porter, Tyler Schmiderberg, Joshua B. Southerland, Jennifer Spillers, Leonard W. Wilson and Ran Xiao. We would also like to thank the infants and their parents who have been volunteering to participate in this research. This work was supported in part by the NSF Division of Information & Intelligent Systems award #1208639 under the National Robotics Initiative.
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Ghazi, M.A., Nash, M.D., Fagg, A.H., Ding, L., Kolobe, T.H.A., Miller, D.P. (2016). Novel Assistive Device for Teaching Crawling Skills to Infants. In: Wettergreen, D., Barfoot, T. (eds) Field and Service Robotics. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 113. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27702-8_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27702-8_39
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