Development of one hand drive wheelchair system: Design and Experiment of the active front wheel system

The purpose of this study is to propose the wheelchair system enabling hemiplegic users to steer the wheelchair by one hand drive. This system consists of two parts: extraction of user's control intention from the single hand rim and the front wheel system with active steering. In particular, this paper focuses on the feasibility verification of this system and to propose the front wheel system. For this verification, the rigid body dynamics simulation was conducted. The result showed that the orientation of the wheelchair could be changed by driving the single driving wheel and by steering the front wheel. The required steering torque for front wheel was derived to design the front wheel system. After that, the prototype was proposed. Then the basic experiment was conducted to verify the efficiency of the system. The result of the experiment showed that the orientation of the wheelchair could be changed by steering front wheel and by one hand drive.