Development of an excretion care support robot with human cooperative characteristics.

To support care giving in an aging society with a shrinking population, various life support robots are being developed. In the authors' laboratory, an excretion care support robot (ECSR) with human cooperative characteristic has been developed to relieve the burden of caregivers and improve the quality of life for bedridden persons. This robot consists of a portable toilet with storage tank and a mobile robot which can run autonomously to conduct the cooperative work with others. Our research is focused on how to improve the motion accuracy and how the robot can cooperate with users. In this paper, to enable the ECSR could precisely move in the indoor environment, a proper controller is proposed considering the center of gravity shift and load changes. Then, to perform the cooperative task, two acceleration sensors are used to recognize the users' intended posture and position when moving from bed to toilet. The robot's target angle and position are determined by the user's posture. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a pseudo excretion support experiment.