Coordinated movement algorithm for accompanying cane robot

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a prototype of a smaller cane robot which accompanies a user with or without physical contact. In clinical gait training for elderly or physically challenged people, there has been a growing demand for functions of walking assistive devices for efficient improvement of their physical ability. We propose a contact control and a non-contact coordinated motion control algorithms of the cane robot in order to autonomously keep the desired relative distance from the user based on the estimated walking direction by the user's leg movement. We demonstrate the position control precision of the proposed control algorithm in walking experiments.