Novel Assistive Device for Teaching Crawling Skills to Infants

Crawling is a fundamental skill linked to development far beyond simple mobility. Infants who have cerebral palsy and similar conditions learn to crawl late, if at all, pushing back other elements of their development. This paper describes the development of a robot (the Self-Initiated Prone Progression Crawler V3, or SIPPC3) that assists infants in learning to crawl. When an infant is placed onboard, the robot senses contact forces generated by the limbs interacting with the ground. The robot then moves or raises the infant’s trunk accordingly. The robot responses are adjustable such that even infants lacking the muscle strength to crawl can initiate movement. The novel idea that this paper presents is the use of a force augmenting motion mechanism to help infants learn how to crawl.