Control and path planning of a walk-assist robot using differential flatness

With the growth of elderly population in our society, technology will play an important role in providing functional mobility to humans. In this paper, we propose a robot walking helper with both passive and active control modes of guidance. From the perspective of human safety, the passive mode adopts the braking control law on the wheels to differentially steer the vehicle. The active mode can guide the user efficiently when the passive control with user-applied force is not adequate for guidance. The theory of differential flatness is used to plan the trajectory of control gains within the proposed scheme of the controller. Since the user input force is not known a-priori, the theory of model predictive control is used to periodically compute the trajectory of these control gains. The simulation results show that the walking assist robot, along with the structure of this proposed control scheme, can guide the user to a goal effectively.