Model Predictive Control for Human Following Rehabilitation Robot

A new type of rehabilitation robot that can follow the user side-by-side is designed for aiding the elderly and disabled. The Human Following Rehabilitation Robot (HFRR) consists of a metal armrest, a set of sensors and a differential mobile base. By predicting the user's speed in the future through the user's current walking speed and the preset path, the problem of human following side-by-side is converted to a problem of keeping a certain lateral distance from the predicted trajectory. Linearizing the tracking error model, the nonholonomic mobile robot (NMR) can maintain a certain lateral distance from the trajectory by using Model Predictive Control (MPC) and then follow the user side-by-side. The simulation and experimental results show the proposed controller can obtain good performance in this problem.