WHEELIE – a Force-Augmenting Self-Stabilizing Wheelchair to Overcome Daily Life Obstacles
The powered wheelchair race at the CYBATHLON 2016 demonstrated the impressive range of obstacles that state-of-the-art powered wheelchairs can overcome. However, this capability came at a cost: many of the presented designs were bulky and not adapted to everyday use. At the same time, Heinz Frei, a highly successful wheelchair athlete, was able to independently complete all of the CYBATHLON obstacles, with the exception of stair ascent, with his conventional, manual wheelchair.
The strength and trained sense of balance surely contributed greatly to this achievement, but both of these abilities could be provided to most wheelchair users through technology, in the form of a self-stabilizing pushrim-activated power-assist wheelchair (PAPAW). This project aims to identify promising power-assist features for an advanced PAPAW, derive a dynamic model of such a wheelchair to design and test control strategies, as well as identify a suitable hardware platform on which this controller could be implemented and tested on (parts of) the Cybathlon parcours.
