Quantitative Evaluation of Clothing Assistance using Whole-Body Robotic Simulator of the Elderly

摘要

The recent demographic trend across developed nations shows a dramatic increase in the aging population, fallen fertility rates and a shortage of caregivers. Robotic solutions to clothing assistance can significantly improve the Activity of Daily Living (ADL) for the elderly and disabled. We have developed a clothing assistance robot using dual arms and conducted many successful demonstrations with healthy people. It was, however, impossible to systematically evaluate its performance because human arms are not visible due to occlusion from a shirt and robot during dressing. To address this problem, we propose to use another robot, Whole-Body Robotic Simulator of the Elderly that can mimic the posture and movement of the elderly persons during the dressing task. The dressing task is accomplished by utilizing Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMP) wherein the control points of DMP are determined by applying forward kinematics on the robotic simulator. The experimental results show the plausibility of our approach.