A simplified modular petri net for the walking assistant robot

Abstract

The walking assistant robot (WAR) provides powder assist and navigation operation for the elderly and injured. The WAR need integrate different kinds of sensors to recognize people's intents and execute different functions to help people, such as assist seating/standing up, assist walking, human tracking, location, obstacle detection, avoidance and so on. What's more, WAR need to be flexible enough to integrate new equipments for different requests of the elderly and injured. In this paper, a Simplified Modular Petri Net (SMPN) is proposed to describe and control the distributed module behaviors of the walking assistant robot system. The simplified MPN has been applied to control SJTU's WAR-Walkmate. The experiment results show that SMPN can control the Walkmate to integrate different modules and perform various tasks successfully. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.