2018 年 84 巻 858 号 p. 17-00349
Recently, electrical welfare vehicles driven by two motors employing free casters are widely used by patients and elders. However, as the user is not able to drive the vehicle well on the uneven rough roads, it is necessary to apply a new mechanism to drive on the rough road in order to expand driving area. The skid steer vehicle (SSV) has been used because of its high traveling ability on the rough road. However, the SSV has disadvantage that is, the driving assistance is required because its steering is highly affected by the road condition. The aim of this study is to design a driving assistance system of SSV for patients and elders by using Model Error Compensator (MEC) that suppresses the modeling error. The proposed controller consists of MEC, Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) that reduces sensor noise and system noise, and estimator of on-line cornering power of SSV. The effectiveness of the proposed system using on-line cornering power estimator is confirmed by the outdoor driving experiments. And the improvement of the driving assistance is evaluated by the correlation of the joystick manipulation comparing the paved and the dirt roads.
