The wheel control of a robotic walker for standing and walking assistance with stability

This paper proposes a robotic walker system with standing and walking assistance device. Our system focuses on domestic use for aged person who needs nursing in their daily life. Our key ideas are two topics. The first topic is combination of standing assistance function and walking assistance function. In previous works, many assistance devices are specialized in only ldquostanding-up operationrdquo or ldquowalking operationrdquo. However, in their daily life, elderly person requires standing, walking and seating assistance by a same device continuously. Our developing assistance system can support both operations by a small sized mechanism with low cost for domestic use. The second topic is standing assistance operation using assistance manipulator and active walker function. In order to maintain the stability of the patients during this motion, it is required to maintain the body balance of the patient into the range of his foot. According to the patientpsilas posture during standing up, our control system selects more appropriate controller for realizing his stability. The performance of our proposed control scheme is experimented by computer simulations and experiments using our prototype.