A novel steering mechanism of two-wheeled wheel chair for stability improvement

Abstract

In this paper, a control method to improve the static stability of two-wheeled wheel chair is proposed. The two-wheeled wheel chair is the wheel chair without caster wheels, and moves and stabilizes with only two wheels. It has good operability and capability to go over a step. However, two-wheeled wheel chair has difficulty in statical stabilization because of the structure. In this paper, the steering system is introduced to the two-wheeled wheel chair. The effect of braking force from the higher inertia and the strain of tires are considered. A miniaturized two-wheeled wheel chair with steering motors is made to conduct experiments. The validity of proposed method is checked through experiment, and the results are evaluated by the movement distance and the change of pitch angle.