Browsing by Author "Huang, Yi-Che"

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Active and Passive Control of Walk-Assist Robot for Outdoor Guidance
(2013-06-01)
Ko, Chun-Hsu
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Young, Kuu-Young
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Huang, Yi-Che
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Agrawal, Sunil Kumar
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電機工程學系
In the currently aging society, walk-assist robots can play an important role in improving the activities of daily living of the elderly. In this paper, we propose a robot walking helper with both passive and active control modes for guidance. From the perspective of human safety, the passive mode adopts a braking control law on the wheels to differentially steer the vehicle. However, if the user walks uphill in the outdoor environment, external forces need to be supplied to the human-walker system. In this paper, we add an active mode to guide the user in situations where the passive control mode alone with user-applied forces is not adequate for guidance. The theory of differential flatness is used to plan the trajectory of control gains within the proposed scheme of the controller. Since the user input force and slope angle of the path are not known a priori, the theory of model predictive control is used to periodically compute the trajectory of these control gains. The simulation and experiment results show that the walk-assist robot, along with the structure of this proposed control scheme, can guide the user to a goal on a slope effectively.
Collision-Free Guidance for Passive Robot Walking Helper
(2012-01-01)
Huang, Yi-Che
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Wu, Cheng-Je
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Ko, Chun-Hsu
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Young, Kuu-Young
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電子工程學系及電子研究所
With the increase of aging population, robot walking helpers have been developed to assist the elderly in their daily life. Based on our previous work, a passive robot walking helper (named i-Go) equipped with a guidance strategy, in this paper, we further propose a navigation scheme for obstacle avoidance. The proposed scheme first locates the waypoints in the collision-free areas, and then guides the i-Go to reach the desired target with the specified orientation. Simulations and experiments are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The results demonstrate that the scheme can guide the user to avoid the obstacles and successfully approach the target with the specified orientation.
Motion Guidance for a Passive Robot Walking Helper via User\'s Applied Hand Forces
(2016-12)
Hsieh, Yi-Hung
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Huang, Yi-Che
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Young, Kuu-Young
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Ko, Chun-Hsu
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Agrawal, Sunil K.
As the elderly population is rapidly growing in our society, robot walking helpers are receiving more attention these days. To be practical and safe for use in daily life, an important issue is whether these robot walking helpers can be effectively maneuvered and provide guidance to the users. These concerns become even more important for a passive robot walking helper, as it relies mainly on the user\'s applied forces to move. In this paper, we propose a motion guidance system for a passive robot walking helper. More specifically, we develop a system to identify user\'s intentions from applied grip forces. This system consists of a pair of force-sensing grips attached to the handles of the robot walking helper and a learning scheme for themapping between the measured grip forces and the driving force/torque imposed on the helper. The learning scheme, combined with an assistive strategy extended from our previous work, provides motion guidance to the elders during walking. The feasibility of the proposed system is demonstrated via a series of experiments involving motion assistance with i-Go, a passive robot walking helper developed in our laboratory.
Walk-Assist Robot: A Novel Approach to Gain Selection of a Braking Controller Using Differential Flatness
(2013-11-01)
Ko, Chun-Hsu
;
Young, Kuu-Young
;
Huang, Yi-Che
;
Agrawal, Sunil K.
;
電機工程學系
With increasing populations of the elderly in our society, robot technology will play an important role in providing functional mobility to humans. From the perspective of human safety, it is desirable that controllers for walk-assist robots be dissipative, i.e., the energy is supplied from the human to the walker, while the controller modulates this energy. The simplest form of a dissipating controller is a brake, where resistive torques are applied to the wheels proportional to their speeds. The fundamental question that we ask in this brief is how to modulate these proportional gains over time for the two wheels so that the walker can perform point-to-point motions. The unique contribution of this brief is a novel way in which the theory of differential flatness is used to plan the trajectory of these braking gains. Since the user input forces are not known a priori, the trajectory of the braking gain is computed iteratively during the motion. Simulation and experimental results show that the walk-assist robot, along with the structure of this proposed control scheme, can guide the user to reach the goal.