Abstract
We have been developing an omnidirectional walker (ODW) to provide safe and convenient walking support service to the people suffering from walking disabilities. In walking support, the ODW need to follow the user's directional intention to support the user's movement, making it necessary for the ODW to understand the user's directional intention. Jji this paper, we propose a novel interface to recognize the user's directional intention according to the forearm pressures. The forearm pressures exerted to the ODW by the user with wrists and elbows are measured by 4 force sensors which are embedded in the ODW's armrest. The relationship between directional intention and forearm pressure was extracted as fuzzy rules and an algorithm was proposed for directional intention identification based on distance-type fuzzy reasoning method. We conduct a path tracking experiment using the proposed method. The results show that the algorithm is applicable to the ODW's direction control in walking support.
