Daily support robots that move on the body

Abstract

Today, wearable devices such as Google Glass and SmartWatch are gathering attention. These devices can constantly support us by being worn on a daily basis. In contrast, although we can also find an increase of personal robots in daily life, "wearable robots" are not so prevalent. We focus on wearable robots and the "fixed" points on which they are worn. We believe that they can provide more continuous and suitable support in a variety of ways by moving automatically on our bodies. Therefore, we propose a daily support system with a wearable robot that moves on the body, and we developed a small prototype robot that can move on a rail fixed on a belt worn on the human body.