Collision-free guidance for passive robot walking helper

With the increase of aging population, robot walking helpers have been developed to assist the elderly in their daily life. Based on our previous work, a passive robot walking helper (named i-Go) equipped with a guidance strategy, in this paper, we further propose a navigation scheme for obstacle avoidance. The proposed scheme first locates the waypoints in the collision-free areas, and then guides the i-Go to reach the desired target with the specified orientation. Simulations and experiments are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The results demonstrate that the scheme can guide the user to avoid the obstacles and successfully approach the target with the specified orientation.