Abstract
In the near future due to the aging of society, manual wheelchairs with add-on drives are expected to be used many elderly and handicapped persons because of its folding functions and lighter weight compared with conventional electric wheelchairs. However it needs complex mechanisms and high spec. motors with advanced control technologies for coordinating two drive wheels to rotate correctly. In this paper, a new system using an active-caster is proposed to overcome these problems. The proposed system enabled a manual wheelchair to be moved as same manner as the conventional electric wheelchairs hence it equips single drive wheel. In this paper, the kinematics of the wheelchair with an active-caste is modeled for deriving a control law and analyzing the motion of a motorized wheelchair. The experiments shows expected moving capabilities in the 2DOFs of the wheelchair are controlled independently with no restrictions of a non-holonomic constraint.
