DEVELOPMENT OF A PASSIVE-TYPE ROBOTIC WHEELCHAIR

摘要

We propose a novel intelligent wheelchair based on the passive robotics. Our proposed assistive wheelchair consists of a frame, casters, wheels and servo brakes. Controlling a torque of the servo brake, our wheelchair changes its dynamics and realizes the reference tracks. Our system requires no actuators, and its mechanism is simple and low cost. There is no risk by malfunction of servomotors and patients can use it intuitively because they use our wheelchair passively with their own intentional force. Our key ideas are two topics. One is the development of the passive-type assistive wheelchair for practical use. In previous researches, assistive wheelchairs use actuators and their systems are complexity. Without actuators, our system realizes the simple mechanism which is easy to implement for a general standard wheelchair. The other key topic is proposing a human adaptive motion control algorithm, which changes the dynamics of our wheelchair according to reference tracks and input driving force by its user. Using proposed scheme, the user can drive our wheelchair with natural feeling. We test our proposed assistance system by the experiments with our prototype and verify its effectiveness.