Wheel-Legged Robotic Limb to Assist Human With Load Carriage: An Application For Environmental Disinfection During COVID-19

Abstract

During COVID-19, with a heavy sprayer filled with disinfectant, the risk of infection for epidemic prevention personnel has been increased by long-term environmental disinfection. In order to reduce the burden and save energy of human, this letter proposed a Wheel-Legged Robotic Limb (WRL) for the carriers. The mass of WRL is only 1.77 kg. The WRL has one rigid robotic limb located below the sprayer, which can provide active supporting force for the sprayer. The WRL adopts force closed-loop control method to ensure the system provide an expected supporting force. The system performance was evaluated including standing and walking at 5 km/h, under three experimental conditions included: 1) with a sprayer, 19.41 kg (SPRAYER), 2) with the powered WRL, 22.18 kg (WRL_ON), and 3) with the unpowered WRL, 22.18 kg (WRL_OFF). When the supporting force is set as 80 N, the experimental results show that the WRL_ON condition has reduced the vertical load force on the human, the vertical ground reaction force of human feet, and the metabolic power by 41.28%, 8.03%, and 17.46% during standing, and also reduced by 32.29%, 8.08% and 18.92% during walking, compared to SPRAYERcondition, respectively.