Walking-aid cane robot applying light touch effect

Abstract

This paper describes a cane type single-wheel inverted pendulum robot for walking aid, which is lightweight and compact. This robot aims to be used in ordinary living environments including narrow place and steps, to be an alternative to a cane. In order to verify the effectiveness of the stabilization by this robot, we conducted an experiment observing trunk sway of a volunteer while he walked with/without our robot. In this experiment, his gait imitated a weak gait function by placing a knee supporter on the knee joint. The trunk sway was used as an evaluation criterion because we anticipated that trunk sway during walking could be reduced by supplementing the sense of balance by the light touch effect. As a result of this experiment, it was confirmed that our robot could reduce the trunk sway of the volunteer by about 20[%] comparing one without our robot.