Abstract
Home oxygen therapy (HOT) is a medical treatment for patients suffering from severe lung diseases. Although a walk in an outdoor environment is recommended for the patients to keep physical strength, patients always have to carry a portable oxygen supplier which is not sufficiently light weight for the patients. Our ultimate goal is to develop a mobile robot carrying an oxygen tank and follows a foregoing patient in an urban outdoor environment. We have proposed a mobile robot with a tether interface to detect the relative position of the foregoing patient. In this paper, we improve mobile platform mechanisms and active wheels to maximize the negotiating step height, and to allocate sufficient luggage area in the main body carrying an actual oxygen tank. The following control algorithm is also improved and demonstrate its effectiveness in an outdoor following experiment.
