Browsing by Subject "walking"
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Item Design for the Frail Old: Environmental and Perceptual Influences on Corridor Walking Behaviors of Assisted Living Residents(2010-10-12) Lu, ZhipengRegular walking has several physical and psychological benefits for frail older people. However, many residents in long-term care facilities are too sedentary to achieve these benefits. Indoor walking appears to be a feasible way to promote active living among these residents and yet, there is little research that has been done in this regard. The researcher conducted two studies in Central Texas to explore how corridor design features influenced indoor walking behaviors among assisted living residents. In the first study, the researcher carried out six focus groups with 50 assisted living residents, discussing how they perceived the indoor corridor as "walkable." Residents reported that a walkable corridor should be safe, comfortable, and having beautiful/interesting things to see. In the second study, the researcher further examined the relationship between the built environment and walking behaviors among 326 residents from 18 facilities in a major city of Texas. The results indicated that 'perceived looped corridor' and 'number of stories' were significantly associated with residents' frequencies of indoor recreational walking. In addition, the availability and quality of sitting space around mailbox areas influenced the number of "walking to mailbox" trips. This research provides empirical evidence to develop activity-friendly facility design guidelines, and to create environmental interventions to facilitate active lifestyles among long-term care residents.Item Flat-Foot Dynamic Walking via Human-Inspired Controller Design(2014-05-05) Ma, WenlongThis thesis describes a torque control scheme unifying feedback PD control and feed-forward impedance control to realize human-inspired walking on a novel planar footed bipedal robot: AMBER2. It starts with high fidelity modeling of the robot including nonlinear dynamics, motor model, and impact dynamics. Human data is then used by an optimization algorithm to produce a human-like walking gait that can be implemented on the robot, which is represented in the form of canonical walking functions. To realize the bipedal walking, first a PD controller is utilized to track the optimized trajectory. Next, impedance control parameters are estimated from the experimental data of a successful walking with AMBER2. Finally, the unified PD, impedance torque control law is experimentally realized on the bipedal robot AMBER2. Through the evidence of sustainable and unsupported walking achieved on AMBER2 showing high consistency with the simulated walking gait, the feasibility of AMBER2 walking scheme will be verified.