A hand movement which shows the intention of a robotic guide for safe walking

This paper proposes a guide system which uses an intended hand force of a robotic guide for elderly and visually impaired people. In general, we lead these people by the hand with a different way according to the situation. For example, we lead these people strongly and rapidly for avoiding a dangerous situation. For realizing our proposed system, this paper describes the following two key topics. The first, we analyze a hand movement, which leads the other person in each situation, and investigate the characteristics of it which the follower can estimate the intention of the leader according to the situation. From our investigation, the minimum jerk trajectory model can appropriate the velocity references of a hand movement and timing of peak velocity during one hand motion tends to show the intention of its leader. The second, we design the velocity references of a hand movement based on the analysis results and for verify its effectiveness, we implement the proposed idea to our prototype robotic guide. Using our idea, our guide robot can show the situation of the surrounding environment to its follower by a hand movement.