Load-free control of power-assisted cycle

Society is rapidly aging. Assistance with a daily life of elderly people is one of the most important social issues. In this article, we introduce an alternative control algorithm of a power-assisted cycle for assisting daily locomotion of elderly people. The proposed algorithm compensates dragging force completely so that a biker could ride the cycle on any road as if he/she rides on a horizontal road. The proposed control algorithm is experimentally applied to an electrical tricycle and the experimental results illustrate the validity of the proposed algorithm.