Neuro-fuzzy control of a power assist Omni-directional Wheelchair to enhance maneuverability

For helping attendants of handicapped people and elderly people, a power assist system has been added to an omni-directional wheelchair (OMW). With this addition it is possible for the attendants to deal with heavy loads, but there is a problem of operability when the attendants want to move the OMW laterally or rotate around OMW's gravity center (CG). In this paper, for solving this problem, a fuzzy reasoning method has been proposed for estimating the navigation direction according to the force added by the attendants to the handgrips of the handle of the OMW. A neuro-fuzzy system (ANFIS) is used for the tuning of the membership functions of the fuzzy system according to each attendant's characteristics, by using the input data of the attendants