Implementation and experimental evaluation of an omnidirectional wheelchair for sports and moving in rooms with narrow spaces

Abstract

The aged tendency of population and rapid growth in the number of disabled people caused by diseases or injuries require to build wheelchairs with good performance. Also, the wheelchair should provide the user with many benefits, such as maintaining mobility, continuing or broadening community and social activities, conserving strength and energy, and enhancing quality of life. The wheelchair body must be compact enough and should be able to make different movements in order to have many applications. In this paper, we present the implementation and experimental evaluation of an omnidirectional wheelchair for sports and moving in rooms with narrow spaces. The experimental evaluation shows that the implemented wheelchair has a good behaviour and can be used for real applications.