Abstract
In recent years, Japan is facing a problem of an aging society with a falling birth rate. This creates growing concerns among people about declining social welfare services due to manpower shortage. In order to deal with such a problem, it is expected to develop a robot which can perform tasks in a human living environment. In this situation, wheelchair robots are one of the promising solutions for care support of elderly people and so on. Our solution for the problem is to propose an autonomous wheelchair robot focused on compact mobility functioning in a wider range of spaces and to prototype the robot TAKAO 4 based on the concept. This paper presents the outline of underlying prototype robots TAKAO 1-3, the concept for developing new wheelchair robot, expected functions, and designing the robot.
