Effective Maneuver for Passive Robot Walking Helper Based on User Intention

In response to an aging society, a robot walking helper has come up as a research focus. To be practical for use in daily lives for the elderly, it should be able to follow user intention during maneuver and provide motion assistance when demanded. As quite a number of guidance schemes have been proposed, the studies on maneuver are comparatively few. This paper thus proposes a maneuvering system for the passive type of robot walking helper based on user intention. The proposed system first recognizes motion intention from user-applied force and hip rotation, and then utilizes an assistive control strategy to generate proper braking torque for effective maneuver. Experiments in a real environment are conducted for demonstration.