Abstract
Purpose of this study is to reduce the pain on a patient laid in the bed of ambulance. An actively controlled pendulum type bed is being proposed in order to achieve this purpose. This bed system prevents the patient from swaying on the bed as the ambulance turns around a corner and from surging as the ambulance increases or decreases the speed. It is designed to provide the passive safety and the robustness of the controller. In addition, it is designed to prevent the patient from getting carsick. In this paper, a feedforward system is developed to improve the performance of the feedback control system tilting the bed. A half scale model of the actively controlled pendulum type bed is produced and loaded on a pickup truck. The control experiments have been conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the actively controlled pendulum type bed system with the feedforward system. As the result, the remaining acceleration parallel to the bed plane is held less than the half, even if the acceleration affecting the vehicle changes rapidly.
