Abstract
Recent advances in mobile robotic technologies have enabled significant progress to be made in the development of Stair-Climbing Mobility Systems (SCMSs) for people with mobility impairments and limitations. These devices are mainly characterized by their ability to negotiate those architectural barriers associated with climbing stairs (curbs, ramps, etc.). The development of advanced trajectory generators with which to surpass such architectural barriers is one of the most important aspects of SCMSs that has not yet been appropriately exploited. These advanced trajectory generators have a considerable influence on the time invested in the stair climbing process and on passenger comfort and, consequently, provide people with physical disabilities with greater independence and a higher quality of life. In this paper, we propose a new nonlinear trajectory generator for an SCMS. This generator balances the stair-climbing time and the user’s comfort and includes the most important constraints inherent to the system behavior: the geometry of the architectural barrier, the reconfigurable nature of the SCMS (discontinuous states), SCMS state-transition diagrams, comfort restrictions and physical limitations as regards the actuators, speed and acceleration. The SCMS was tested on a real two-step staircase using different time-comfort combinations and different climbing strategies to verify the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed approach.
Highlights
Stair-Climbing Mobility Systems (SCMSs) are assistive devices for people whose mobility is impaired and limited
We develop a dynamic model under quasi-static conditions since the SCMS is assumed to be slow moving
Necessary to find a relationship between the articular variables and the system variables for all the possible configurations and to use the model provided by Equation (22) in order to obtain a new model as a function of q rather than r, i.e., τ = B(q)q + C(q, q)q + G(q), (23)
Summary
Stair-Climbing Mobility Systems (SCMSs) are assistive devices for people whose mobility is impaired and limited. With fully-autonomous SCMSs, a trajectory planning is considered for the stair-climbing operation These models generally utilize algorithms to detect objects and avoid collisions and, in some cases, algorithms with which to estimate the dimensions of the stairs in order to derive a path using trajectory planning and trajectory optimization strategies. The objective of the proposed method is to minimize a cost function, which is a weighted balance of stair-climbing time and the user’s comfort This optimization problem is solved by using a Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) technique.
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