User directional intention recognition of an omnidirectional walking support walker

An omnidirectional walking support walker (ODW) is being developed. In order to provide walking support according to the user directional intention, we propose a method to recognize the user directional intention from forearm pressures. The pressures between forearms and the ODW are measured by 4 force sensors embedded in the ODW´s armrest. The relationship between forearm pressure and user directional intention was extracted as fuzzy rules and an algorithm was proposed for directional intention identification based on the distance type fuzzy reasoning method. We conducted a path tracking experiment with the proposed method. The results showed that the method was applicable to the ODW´s direction control in walking support.