Abstract
A Five-wheeled wheelchair is composed by a manual wheelchair with an active-caster drive system. In this paper, we propose a novel step climbing mechanism and method for expanding the area of activity for users. Because this wheelchair has five-wheel-contact to the ground, the wheelchair can keep the posture when the front casters or the large wheels are hovered. We apply this static stability motion to the step climbing method. We develop a novel step climbing mechanism and verify the designing condition for realizing a proposed step cimbing method. After constructing the prototype model, we confirm the validity of the proposed step climbing mechanism.
