Development of a joystick drive car

Abstract

This report presents the development of joystick drive system for disabled persons. The developed device allows a disabled person to drive a car by joystick operation with small force and short stroke to rotate the steering wheel and to activate the gas pedal and the brake pedal respectively. The concept of a joystick car is to enable a severely disabled person to take independent actions with a car driven by oneself with no human assistance. However, in order to provide a joystick car, safety, reliability and driving-stability are strongly required. To satisfy these requirements, a drive mechanism, a control CPU board and a control software program were originally designed and developed. For safe and comfortable driving using a joystick, a unique control algorithm including a steering restriction function and a variable sensitivity function were developed and implemented as well. An outline of each technical item is described in this report.