Design and development of single side driven wheelchairs by using internal model control

This study is focused on the design and testing of a newly assisting unit for standard wheelchairs for hemiplegia person. People with this type of disability often drive standard wheelchairs with one active hand and foot in the present situation. Conventional single side driven non-powered wheelchairs have various types of problems, e.g., large rotation radius, difficulty of operations. The purpose of this paper is to solve these problems of current single side driven wheelchairs by using internal model control (IMC) design structure from technology of independence point of view. The control method by combining the IMC design with limiting properties of LQ control is implemented to the single side driven wheelchair. Robust stability for parameter perturbation is also discussed theoretically. The experimental results show that the method is effective on tracking control for the single side driven wheelchair.