Disturbance Road Driving Control for Power-Assisted Wheelchair Based on User Evaluation Map

Abstract

The “power-assisted wheelchair” that assists the driving force by electric motors is expected to be widely used as a mobility support system for elderly people and disabled people; however, there are lots of large disturbance roads such as uphill roads and rough roads and operators need to push handrims with larger power load to obtain enough driving distance and velocity. Therefore this paper proposes a driving control scheme of power-assisted wheelchairs for the comfortable and safety driving on large disturbance roads. This study constructs the individual user evaluation maps with optimal driving parameters in advance in order to realize the comfortable and safety driving which depends on users and disturbance roads. The proposed control system estimates the driving disturbance level and determines some driving parameters based on user evaluation maps. The optimal assistance ratio and target driving distance are designed according to the disturbance level and user preference. Some experiment results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed driving control system.