Estimating Road Surface and Gradient using Internal Sensors for Robot Assist Walker

Abstract

Many industrialized countries are facing the issue of a rapidly aging population, with 25.1% of the population of such countries being at least 65 years old. Care for elderly persons by robotic devices is expected to become more widespread. It is important to encourage the spread of nursing-care robots into more care facilities. Therefore, the final goal of the project discussed here is to develop a system that can suitably introduce robotic devices for nursing care. In this study, the target robot is the robot assist walker. To analyze the usage situations of robot walkers, the benchmark data of robotic devices we measured and estimation algorithms were developed. The proposed algorithm can estimate the road slope, irregular ground, and braking action using the low sampling data of inertia sensors. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, an operator walked outdoors with the robot walker, and the sensor data were stored into a cloud server. The proposed algorithm could estimate the road surface information, and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was confirmed.