Wheelchair Driving Control Considering Sway Suppression to Passenger's Posture and Evaluation of Ride Quality

This paper presents an advanced control system for a driving control system of an electrical wheelchair. The aim of the control system is to make possible a comfortable ride in the wheelchair. For this, a passenger model has been constructed and a driving pattern that suppresses sway of passenger's posture has been developed using optimization methods. In the passenger model, it is represented that the passenger's body contacts a backrest in the wheelchair in order to represent precisely the passenger's posture behavior. The proposed passenger model is used to design the driving pattern of the wheelchair. In design of the driving pattern, the sway of the passenger's posture and the traveling time are minimized by the sequential quadratic programming. Then, the quality of the ride whiles a passenger is transferred by the wheelchair has been evaluated by a questionnaire and by measurements of emotional sweating. In comparison with the conventional driving pattern, the proposed driving pattern suppresses about half of the passenger's posture behavior by the conventional pattern and improves the comfort of wheelchair driving.