Control of Foot Trajectory in Perception-Assist with a Power-Assist Robot

Power-assist robots are expected to assist the motion in daily living of physically weak persons. The concept of perception-assist has been proposed to assist the sensory ability in addition to the assist of motor ability of the user. In the perception-assist for a lower-limb power-assist robot, perception-assist can be applied to avoid the unexpected stumbling of the user. In that case, a virtual wall is used to avoid the stumbling of the user. In this paper, the dynamic property of the virtual wall is varied according to the user's foot position to make the proper lower-limb motion. Experiments results show the effectiveness of the defined dynamic property of the virtual wall.