1999 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Development of A Stair Climbing Wheelchair Without An Attendance
| Project/Area Number |
10838045
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
リハビリテーション科学
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| Research Institution | Kansai University |
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Principal Investigator |
AWA Keizo Kansai University, Faculty of Engineering, Associate Professor, 工学部, 助教授 (70067700)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
SHIRAKI Kazuhiro Kansai University, Faculty of Engineering, Professor, 工学部, 教授 (80268309)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1998 – 1999
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| Keywords | Wheelchair / Stair climbing robot / automatic pilot / Subsumption Architecture / SSA / Reliable Control |
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| Research Abstract |
It is not easy for disabled and elderly people to move around with wheelchairs even at public places where all citizen lead a life because of steps, and then elevators or lopes should be equipped at these places. However, under the actual situation in Japan there are few places. In this social background we have developed a new stair climbing mobile robot. There are many kinds of stair climbing robots, but most of them are for the maintenance of nuclear or other power plants, some are for disabled and elderly people as wheelchairs.
This robot has tow wheels in the front of the body to support its weight when it moves on flat terrain, and it also has arms between the wheels to hook onto a tread of stairs. These are tow pairs of legs in the rear of body. Using not only the rotational torque of the arms and the wheels but also the force of the legs, the robot goes up and down stairs. It measures the size of stairs by a CCD camera when going up and down the first step, therefore the measurement process does not cause this robot to lose any time. The computer which controls the motion of the robot needs no complicated calculations as other legged robots do. The control system of the robot is developed by applying the Subsumption Architecture (SSA). This architecture is expectable to achieve high effectiveness in robustness. Then we recognized the effectiveness of this mechanism and system from experimental results. We proposed the prototype of this mechanism and the control algorithm with SSA. The effectiveness of this mechanism is recognized from the experimental results. We will develop the robot with this mechanism for disabled and elderly people.
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