Abstract
With the growing elderly population worldwide, it is crucial to develop an advanced elderly-assistant robot that can assist healthcare workers and reduce the care burden on society. Nonetheless, older people, often associated with decreased muscle strength and increased fatness, could be adversely affected by the induced vibration of the assistant robots. Thus, to help older people execute daily activities while reducing vibration impacts, the vibration characteristics analysis of the human-robot coupled system for the transporting posture of the elderly-assistant robot (EAR) is presented in this paper. The equations of motion for the coupled elderly-EAR system are established using Newton’s second law. Then, the dynamic behavior of the model is investigated and analyzed in a Matlab simulation environment for different road roughness and robot speeds. In addition, real-time experimental analysis was conducted to verify the effectiveness of the derived model using asphalt and interlock roads for the EAR’s speeds of 4.5km/h and 7km/h. The simulation and the experimental results show that the derived model can be efficiently applied to assess the robot-user vibration transmissibility of the road-induced vibration. Finally, the ISO 2631–1 based comfortability analysis demonstrates guaranteed EAR’s stability and ride comfort of the elders on asphalt and interlock roads.