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Development of a Comfort-Based Motion Guidance System for a Robot Walking Helper

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Abstract

In research on providing motion assistance for elderly care, the robot walking helper is considered to be able to maintain their vitality. For its practicality, one issue of interest is its feasible path planning for guidance. Inspired by the concept of including human factors for path planning previously proposed, in this paper, we develop such a motion guidance system for the robot walking helper. We first selected the human factors most vital for the elderly and also public via an Internet survey, and then developed a corresponding path planning algorithm and control strategy for its realization. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. Key contributions of the paper lie on (a) one of the few studies that include human factors into path planning of the robot walking helper and (b) a more thorough consideration on comfort with both physical and psychological factors corresponding to elderly and public preference included.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, under Grant MOST 108-2221-E-214-034.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, 1001 University Road, Hsinchu, 300, Taiwan

    Kuu-young Young & Hao-Wei Tsou

  2. Department of Multimedia and Game Developing Management, Far East University, No.49, Zhonghua Rd., Xinshi Dist., Tainan City, 74448, Taiwan

    Shu-Ling Cheng

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, I-Shou University, No.1, Sec. 1, Syuecheng Rd., Dashu District, Kaohsiung City, 84001, Taiwan

    Chun-Hsu Ko

Authors
  1. Kuu-young Young
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  2. Shu-Ling Cheng
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  3. Chun-Hsu Ko
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  4. Hao-Wei Tsou
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Contributions

K.-Y. Young and C.-H. Ko conceived the system and supervised the experiments. S.-L. Cheng contributed to experimental design and performance evaluation. H.-W. Tsou developed the system and conducted the experiments.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shu-Ling Cheng.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Young, Ky., Cheng, SL., Ko, CH. et al. Development of a Comfort-Based Motion Guidance System for a Robot Walking Helper. J Intell Robot Syst 100, 379–388 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-020-01168-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-020-01168-2

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