Title: Implementation and experimental evaluation of an omnidirectional wheelchair for sports and moving in rooms with narrow spaces

Authors: Keita Matsuo

Addresses: Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Fukuoka Institute of Technology (FIT), 3-30-1 Wajiro-Higashi, Higashi-Ku, Fukuoka 811-0295, Japan

Abstract: The aged tendency of population and rapid growth in the number of disabled people caused by diseases or injuries require to build wheelchairs with good performance. Also, the wheelchair should provide the user with many benefits, such as maintaining mobility, continuing or broadening community and social activities, conserving strength and energy, and enhancing quality of life. The wheelchair body must be compact enough and should be able to make different movements in order to have many applications. In this paper, we present the implementation and experimental evaluation of an omnidirectional wheelchair for sports and moving in rooms with narrow spaces. The experimental evaluation shows that the implemented wheelchair has a good behaviour and can be used for real applications.

Keywords: wheelchair; omni-wheel; robotics; communication; directional sensors; wheelchair for sports.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSC.2017.084118

International Journal of Space-Based and Situated Computing, 2017 Vol.7 No.1, pp.1 - 7

Received: 27 Oct 2016
Accepted: 30 Dec 2016
Published online: 12 May 2017 *

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