Enhancing the Trajectory Generation of a Stair-Climbing Mobility System

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.

Virtual Reality Simulation of a Quadrotor to Monitor Dependent People at Home

“…Trajectory planning problematic has attracted the interest of the research community in recent years [33], [34], [35], [36], [37] as it is one of the main technical aspects to sort out for autonomous navigation of mobile robots and the control of mechatronic systems. In this sense, this section explains the trajectory planner implemented for the quadrotor.…”

Trajectory Planning of a Quadrotor to Monitor Dependent People

“…Planning trajectories is one of the problems to necessarily resolve when designing autonomous mechatronic systems and mobile robots. For this reason, it is a field that has attracted the interest of the research community in recent years [9,10,24,29]. Thus, this section describes the trajectory planning algorithm designed for the quadrotor.…”

Advanced Trajectory Generator for Two Carts with RGB-D Sensor on Circular Rail

“…Our vision-based solutions are based on human detection [9,10] and tracking [11][12][13]. This paper is also inspired in previous research in multi-robotics [14][15][16] tracking robotics [17][18][19] and rehabilitation robotics [20][21][22].…”