Assisting strategy of walking assistive device on inclined terrain

Abstract

This paper introduces a robotic walking support system, Smart Mobile Walker (SMW), and suggests an assisting strategy through an algorithm which estimates terrain slope on heading direction. There is already a theoretical algorithm to calculate terrain slope, but it does not be suitable to apply on robotic system, because it needs heavy quantity of calculation. Therefore, this paper suggests a simplified algorithm to estimate terrain slope and a feasibility of the algorithm is investigated by comparing theoretical algorithm on simulation environment. The feasibility shows the suggested algorithm can be applied to the real robotic system and makes a base of optimal walking assisting strategy on several terrain types.