Motion Control of a Walking Support Robot Based on Gait Analysis In an aging society with increasing elder people and decreasing caregivers, the ability to live an independent life is desired to relieve the burden of both the elderly people and the society. Since mobility via walking is important both for independent life and maintenance of good health, various walking assistance devices have been developed. Humanfriendly operability is a key issue in the development of these devices for practical use. In this study, we propose to control a walking support robot by the direction of the userxe2x80x99s feet. An application was developed to detect the direction of userxe2x80x99s feet using an infrared camera. We investigated the accuracy of the developed measurement system and measured the direction of the feet when subjects using the walking support robot. The experimental results showed that although individual differences existed, the proposed method was capable of control the walking support robot to run straight forward, turn right, or turn left intuitively.

Design and Basic Control of Extra Robotic Legs for Dynamic Walking Assistance This paper presents an Extra Robotic Legs (XRL) system which is designed to assist in the human walking with carrying loads. The design and basic control of the XRL system are proposed, and performances of the system are verified by primary experiments. The main aim of the design is to enable the XRL system to generate enough power for assistance during the natural human walking with low selfweight. Two robotic legs are designed for the XRL system, and each leg has three degrees of freedom (DOFs): two rotational DOFs intersecting at one point on its basis, and one prismatic one along its length generating assistant forces. The prismatic DOF is driven by synchronous belts along a linear slider, and has a high linear velocity for dynamic walking assistance. A force control method is used to generate assistant forces. The final weight of our autonomous XRL system is 8.3 kg, lower than other relative autonomous systems in present. Primary experiments verify the functional performances of the XRL system. This work may inspire other XRL designs and can expand the applications of wearable robots in daily life.