Disturbance road adaptive driving control of power-assisted wheelchair using fuzzy inference

This paper describes a novel driving control scheme of electric power-assisted wheelchairs for assistive driving on various large disturbance roads. The "electric power-assisted wheelchair" which assists the driving force by electric motors is expected to be widely used as a mobility support system for elderly people and disabled people; however, there are lots of large disturbance roads such as uphill roads and rough roads and operators need to row the hand-rims with the larger power load on such roads in order to obtain the enough driving velocity. For example the wheelchair might move backward on uphill roads due to the driving torque shortage. Therefore this study proposes a fuzzy algorithm based adaptive control scheme in order to realize the assistive driving without the operator's power load on large disturbance roads. The proposed fuzzy rules are designed from the driving distance information and the control parameters are inferred by the fuzzy algorithm. The assisted torque can be adjusted so that the enough distance and velocity are kept even on large disturbance roads. Driving experimental results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control system.