Patient Transfer by Nursing-Care Robots Using Tactile Feedback

随着老龄化社会的进步，对机器人支持老年护理的需求不断增加。例如，帮助病人在床和轮椅之间转移的转移辅助是一项耗费体力的任务。在这项研究中，我们首先制造了一个可以真正转移人类的机器人。该机器人配备了覆盖其手臂大面积的触觉传感器。我们对如何利用这些传感器进行了研究，并提出了触觉信息处理方法来检测操作者的强度，触觉传感器反馈方法来调整机器人的运动轨迹，不伤害被抬病人的皮肤。

With the progress of aging society, the need for robots to support elderly care has been increasing. Transfer assist that helps patient transfer between, for example, a bed and a wheelchair, is one of physically taxing tasks. In this study, we first built a robot that can actually transfer a human. The robot is equipped with tactile sensors covering wide area of its arms. We conducted research how to make use of these sensors, and proposed tactile information processing methods to detect the operator's intension, and tactile sensor feedback method to adjust robot motion trajectory not to hurt the skin of the lifted patient.