Motion Control of a Walking Support Robot Based on Gait Analysis

摘要

In an aging society with increasing elder people and decreasing caregivers, the ability to live an independent life is desired to relieve the burden of both the elderly people and the society. Since mobility via walking is important both for independent life and maintenance of good health, various walking assistance devices have been developed. Human-friendly operability is a key issue in the development of these devices for practical use. In this study, we propose to control a walking support robot by the direction of the user's feet. An application was developed to detect the direction of user's feet using an infrared camera. We investigated the accuracy of the developed measurement system and measured the direction of the feet when subjects using the walking support robot. The experimental results showed that although individual differences existed, the proposed method was capable of control the walking support robot to run straight forward, turn right, or turn left intuitively.