| Summary: | All-terrain wheelchairs are assumed to be used under such conditions that are on the roads along mountain topography, steep slopes, bumpy roads, muddy roads, etc. It is often used for people with disabilities to enjoy outdoor activities in nature with friends and family. In order to deal with such conditions and usages, all-terrain wheelchairs have different structures and features from normal wheelchairs. In this paper, we focus on the type of all-terrain wheelchair that needs to keep the pitch posture during turning. Here, the pitch posture means the state that the front wheel is lifted. It is hard to keep a stable pitch posture on a steep slope and a bumpy road even though the wheelchair is manipulated by an experienced operator. This paper proposes an electric power assist control that keeps this pitch posture stable and reduces the manipulating load of an operator. The most important feature of the control is to control the kinetic energy of the wheelchair, the sum of the energies of longitudinal and pitch motion. This control is implemented on an electrically power assisted wheelchair, and the effectiveness of the control is demonstrated by the experimental results.
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