Control of an omnidirectional walking support walker by forearm pressures

We have been developing an omnidirectional walker (ODW) for walking support. In walking support, it is necessary control the ODW following the user's direction and velocity intentions. In this paper, a novel interface is proposed to recognize the user's intentions 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 embedded in the ODW's armrest. The relationship between forearm pressure and user intentions was extracted as fuzzy rules and an algorithm was proposed for directional intention identification based on the distance-type fuzzy reasoning method. We conduct a path tracking experiment with the proposed method. The results show that the algorithm is applicable to control the ODW.