Nonlinear Programming-Based Robot Motion Planning for Gait Measurement When Passing Pedestrians

In recent years, the workload of healthcare workers in hospitals has increased, and there has been a demand for autonomous patrolling instead of nurses and gait measurements of patients in hospital wards. In this study, a novel motion-planning method is proposed to enable a mobile robot to measure the gait of passing pedestrians while patrolling wards. In nonlinear programming, the feasibility of the gait measurement is evaluated as an object function, and constraints on the robot kinematics, environment, collision avoidance, and target position and arrival time are considered in the constraints. The optimization variables are the trajectory of the robot’s position, velocity, and acceleration. This schematization guarantees that the control input, which is the solution to this problem, satisfies all constraints and is optimized to realize gait measurement. The results of the simulation and experiment demonstrated the efficiency and evolvability of the proposed method.