Riding comfort improvement by considering passenger´s behavior suppression on powered wheelchairs

This paper presents a velocity driving control system of a powered wheelchair for considering the riding comfort in terms of sway suppression of the passenger. This control system aims to provide comfortable ride during the velocity control of wheelchair. To this end, a passenger model which consists of passenger´s physical frame and seating condition is firstly derived for designing the comfort driving pattern. Through fuzzy modeling of the passenger´s posture behavior, the design problem is converted into a passenger´s sway minimization problem such that the optimal fuzzy control methodology via linear matrix inequality (LMI) can be utilized to design the optimal pattern of driving acceleration. The simulation results and experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control system.