Abstract
Intelligent cane is a robot developed for assisting the elderly or handicapped people in walking. As a nursing care device, the cane robot is designed to assist the elderly or handicapped people not only in indoor environments but also in outdoor environments. Also, the cane robot is controlled to prevent the elderly from falling over in the situation where the elderly stumbles. The elderly in the state of stumbling may fall over in forward direction. On the other hand, the elderly in the state of tandem stance may fall over in backward direction. In this paper, the fall prevention method focused on tandem stance is proposed. The motion of the elderly in the state of tandem stance is modeled as the linear inverted pendulum. The cane robot pulls the user in the state of tandem stance and complements the orbital energy so that the user can keep one's balance.
