Development of a Comfort-Based Motion Guidance System for a Robot Walking Helper

In research on providing motion assistance for elderly care, the robot walking helper is considered to be able to maintain their vitality. For its practicality, one issue of interest is its feasible path planning for guidance. Inspired by the concept of including human factors for path planning previously proposed, in this paper, we develop such a motion guidance system for the robot walking helper. We first selected the human factors most vital for the elderly and also public via an Internet survey, and then developed a corresponding path planning algorithm and control strategy for its realization. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. Key contributions of the paper lie on (a) one of the few studies that include human factors into path planning of the robot walking helper and (b) a more thorough consideration on comfort with both physical and psychological factors corresponding to elderly and public preference included.