Mechanism design of a multifunctional motion assistant robot combined wheelchair and exoskeleton

Abstract

With the rapid growth of the number of aging people and the trend in aging, the demand for motion assistant device expected to be lager in the future. As the popular motion assistant device, wheelchair and exoskeleton has strengths and shortages respectively, so a novel motion assistant device combined wheelchair and exoskeleton is proposed in this paper, which has the capable of transforming among wheelchair type, support type and exoskeleton type, and also can be used as wheelchair to carry the user to travel or exoskeleton to assist the user to walk. According to the demands of three types and follow the idea of multi-use of the driver to reduce the weight of the robot and make it more compact, the mechanism satisfying the request was designed and then optimization of bars was processed using particle swarm optimization algorithm.