A Centaur System for Assisting Human Walking with Load Carriage

Ping Yang1; Haoyun Yan1; Bowen Yang1; Jianquan Li2; Kailin Li1; Yuquan Leng1; Chenglong Fu1

10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981394

2022

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

2153-0858

978-1-6654-7928-8

2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

5242-5248

23-27 Oct. 2022

Kyoto, Japan

Walking with load is a common task in daily life and disaster rescue. Long-term load carriage may cause irreversible damage to the human body. Although remarkable progress has been made in the field of wearable robots, it is still far from avoiding interference to human legs, which will lead to energy consumption. In this paper, a novel wearable robot, Centaur, for assisting load carriage has been proposed. The Centaur system consists of two rigid robotic legs of two degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) to transfer load weight to the ground. Different from exoskeletons, the robotic legs of the Centaur are placed behind the human rather than attached to human limbs, which can provide a larger support polygon and avoid additional interference to the wearer. Additionally, the Centaur can attain the locomotion stability of the quadruped while maintaining the motion agility of the biped itself. This paper also presents an interactive motion control strategy based on the human-robot interaction force. This control strategy incorporates legged robotics walking controller and real-time walking trajectory planning to realize the cooperative walking with human beings. Finally, experiments of human walking with load carriage have been conducted on flat terrain to verify the concept of the Centaur system. The result demonstrates that the Centaur system can effectively reduce 70.03% of load weight during the single stance phase, which indicates that the Centaur system provides a new solution for assisting human walking with load-carriage.

Supernumerary Robotic Limbs Wearable Robot Biped Locomotion Human Walking Load Carriage

第一 ; 通讯

英语

IEEE

1.Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Biomimetic Robotics and Intelligent Systems and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Human Augmentation and Rehabilitation Robotics in Universities, Shenzhen, China
2.Department of Automation, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China

Ping Yang,Haoyun Yan,Bowen Yang,et al. A Centaur System for Assisting Human Walking with Load Carriage[C],2022:5242-5248.