Abstract
This paper presents an approach which assist users for driving electric wheelchairs to go straight ahead on slopes, in order to reduce their strains of operations by switches while crossing on a slope. The users who cannot control joysticks due to some kind of physical disabilities, have to use input devices of the simple switch type. It causes one of the crucial problems on crossing slope, where the users have to operate switches more frequently than joysticks so that the wheelchair should go straight. On this approach, the straight-ahead system controls input voltages of left and right motors by reading the yaw angle of the wheelchair. We make a prototype system with simple feedback control. Through the experiments with the prototype system, the effectiveness and the applicability of the proposed system have been confirmed.
