| The lack of nursing care comes along with the aging society. The elderly need to bemore independent from traditional human-based nursing care. Some researchers have beendone on the walking-aid robot yet some critical shortages keep the robot from practicalwork. This paper focuses on a relatively low-cost way for the implement of an intentionbased environment adaptive walking-aid robot, which is designed to be capable of movingin all direction and passing through narrow space, providing safe and efficient walkingassistance for the people who have difficulties in walking.This paper introduces the mechanical structure, control system and control algorithmof the robot in a bottom to top way. Firstly, we make a selection of the drive mood and theimplement of the all-direction drive base under the mechanical design principle. Then wedivide the control system into five modules as power management, signal processing,lower/upper computer program structure and communicating protocol, and transplant thecontroller onto different platform. A new human-robot interactive control algorithmbased on the intent identification algorithm is given and proved theoretically. Finally weconduct three typical experiments as obstacle avoidance, far distance avoidance andwalking through narrow aisle. The validation of the control algorithm is proved by theanalysis of the experiment data.The robot we developed in this paper has the follow characteristics:(1) the unitybetween the stability of mechanical frame and the movability in narrow environment;(2)the safety assurance including collision avoidance and human-robot transactional distancerestrain during co-movement;(3) simple and effective operation interface;(4) relativelylow cost. For the reasons above, a new type of mechanical frame and sensor array isimplemented. In addition, the motion control algorithm is also presented. The followingexperiments conducted under various environment conditions illustrate the validity of thecontrol algorithm. |
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