Proposal of a wireless control system of assist cart for aged people

Recently, proceeding of the aging society has encouraged research and development of power assist systems. The authors´ research group also studied on the control system of robust assist systems. It is mainly considered to be used in industries, such as production factories. However, if such a cart is applied to welfare purposes, the mass of the cart is so heavy to be used by aged people due to the uses of high specification computers and lithium-ion batteries installed on the cart. Therefore, this paper discusses a novel control system concept of the robust assist cart for welfare applications. Especially, as its first step, this paper mentions the downsizing and lightening of the cart to be put high specification computer out of the cart. In the novel concept, the high specification computers out of the cart and the computer on the cart are connected by a network control configuration using Wi-Fi. In addition, this paper reveals the stability of the proposed system by experiments with and without Wi-Fi and simulations.