Control of Foot Trajectory in Perception-Assist with a Power-Assist Robot

Power-assist robots are expected to assist the motion in daily living of physically weak persons. The concept of perception-assist has been proposed to assist the sensory ability in addition to the assist of motor ability of the user. In the perception-assist for a lower-limb power-assist robot, perception-assist can be applied to avoid the unexpected stumbling of the user. In that case, a virtual wall is used to avoid the stumbling of the user. In this paper, the dynamic property of the virtual wall is varied according to the user´s foot position to make the proper lower-limb motion. Experiments results show the effectiveness of the defined dynamic property of the virtual wall.