Study on Control Method for Improving Straightness of Front-Wheel-Drive Wheelchair

At present, the aging rate in Japan is among the highest in the world, and it is progressing at such a rate that it cannot be seen in other countries. Therefore we consider that the number of persons who are difficult to move by oneself will increase. We focus on an electric wheelchair. There are classified roughly into two types by the difference of installed position of drive wheels, and it results in the difference in run properties. We pay our attention to low straightness of front-wheel-drive under these properties. This research aims at finding the cause of low straightness and proposition of the method which improves straightness. We built a human - wheelchair model and performed simulations, and we performed the automatic drive experiments with the wheelchair equipped with a laser sensor. Based on these results, we propose a control method to improve straightness of a front-wheel-drive wheelchair. Finally we confirmed the usefulness of our method by simulations, and experiments.