Hierarchical Shared Control of Cane-Type Walking-Aid Robot

Abstract EN

A hierarchical shared-control method of the walking-aid robot for both human motion intention recognition and the obstacle emergency-avoidance method based on artificial potential field (APF) is proposed in this paper.

The human motion intention is obtained from the interaction force measurements of the sensory system composed of 4 force-sensing registers (FSR) and a torque sensor.

Meanwhile, a laser-range finder (LRF) forward is applied to detect the obstacles and try to guide the operator based on the repulsion force calculated by artificial potential field.

An obstacle emergency-avoidance method which comprises different control strategies is also assumed according to the different states of obstacles or emergency cases.

To ensure the user’s safety, the hierarchical shared-control method combines the intention recognition method with the obstacle emergency-avoidance method based on the distance between the walking-aid robot and the obstacles.

At last, experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical shared-control method.