Design and control for collision avoidance of power-assisted omni-directional mobile wheelchair system

This paper presents a power-assist system of omni-directional mobile wheelchair which considers collision avoidance. Omni-directional mobile robot has advantage such intuitive operation is possible, because the robot can be moved to arbitrary direction instantaneously according to the manipulated input In the past research, power-assisted omni-directional mobile wheelchair has been developed to reduce physical and mental load of care taker when carrying a wheelchair. However, due to the increase of movement's freedom by omni-directional function, the risk of the collision exists at the time of the operation, and a operator cannot necessarily recognize the risk. In order to realize the safe operation, the collision avoidance is highly needed. In this paper, an algorithm urging the evasion to all direction against the risk of collision when the wheelchair is operated by using power-assist system is presented. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through experiments of OMW wheelchair.