Power-assist motion of an electric wheelchair for a caregiver

This paper proposes power-assist motion control of an electric wheelchair for a caregiver. Previous researches about power-assist motion of a wheelchair took operators as an object of study. But caregivers are aging as well as cared people due to growing proportion of elderly people. For detection of the caregiver´s input, the reaction acceleration estimation observer is constructed. The motion of the wheelchair is identified to straight mode or cornering mode by rotational acceleration. The power-assist motion control is realized on each mode. Power-assist motion is performed on velocity. For calculation of the velocity, the acceleration generated by the caregiver´s input is used. Numerical simulation is carried out to show the validity of the proposed method