Velocity control of an omni-directional wheelchair considering user's comfort by suppressing vibration

In this paper, riding comfort of an omnidirectional wheelchair (OMW) driven by joystick is studied for the case when OMW moves in X direction, Y direction, or in a slanting direction. In order to achieve the comfort driving specific spectrum elements such as natural frequency of OMW and discomfort frequency of human organs are suppressed. In order to evaluate the comfort, a human model which considers human upper body composed of two parts: torso and head, has been developed and used in order to test the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Experimental results of velocity control are shown.