For a better maneuverability of the electrically powered wheelchair - a pilot-model based approach

This paper concerns the manual control of the electrically powered wheelchair (EPW) and aims to give some justification to the approaches taken in our previous works on improving maneuverability of the EPW. EPW manipulation of the human operator has been considered along with the pilot model framework and an error criterion has been proposed which describes the pilot's activity to maintain the EPW under his/her preferred control. The presented model has been constructed to coincide both with the already known pilot model results and the empirical knowledge on the strategy of the EPW manipulation of the human pilot. We presume that the poor maneuverability of the EPW implies the difficulty in maintaining this error variable to zero, and the fact would serve as a basis of the automatic controller design for EPWs. A fundamental experiment has been carried out to examine the validity of the error model partly and its result has been reported.