Abstract
Recently, welfare personal vehicles for seniors have been focused on. The piggyback style vehicle, STAVi, was proposed by authors. In case of driving in indoor narrow corridors, since passers dashe out from the doors or the corners occasionally, the driver should be careful about driving. However, it is difficult to avoid obstacles quickly for senior drivers. If avoidance intention of driver can be detected exactly from the motion, safe steering avoidance assistance will be realized. In this paper, a novel steering avoidance assistance method which detects intention from weight shift motion of driver is proposed. The driver controls the STAVi using the center of gravity changes due to weight shift as well as the joystick driving operation. The comfortable maneuverability is achieved using Modeling Error Compensator(MEC), and the avoidance intention can be decided practically using threshold of the weight shift.
