Human-friendly Acceleration Control for Mobile Cart with Torque Sensor Built in Driving Shaft

抄録

Recently, mobile carts have been used in the field of production and welfare. Accordingly, the usability of mobile carts has become more important than ever before, and a human-friendly control technique for users is needed. In this paper, we propose a novel acceleration control for the mobile cart and illustrate that the weight felt by users follows rapidly and precisely the command reference of weight set in the controller. The proposed method makes it possible to control the wheel-side acceleration with a torque sensor built in the driving shaft. The torque sensor measures the output torque of the reduction gear. Moreover, two modes of application using the proposed method are shown. One is the power-assisted mode, and the other is the rehabilitation mode. To confirm the effectiveness of these modes, evaluation values of the usability are defined, and effectiveness is verified by simulations and experiments.