Dynamic control of a reconfigurable stair-climbing mobility system

Abstract

SUMMARYElectric-powered wheelchairs improve the mobility of people with physical disabilities, but the problem to deal with certain architectural barriers has not been resolved satisfactorily. In order to solve this problem, a stair-climbing mobility system (SCMS) was developed. This paper presents a practical dynamic control system that allows the SCMS to exhibit a successful climbing process when faced with typical architectural barriers such as curbs, ramps, or staircases. The implemented control system depicts high simplicity, computational efficiency, and the possibility of an easy implementation in a microprocessor-/microcontrollerbased system. Finally, experiments are included to support theoretical results.KEYWORDS: Electric-powered wheelchairs; Stairclimbing devices; Dynamic modeling; Dynamic control; Mechatronics. List of Symbols

Online signal filtering based on the algebraic method and its experimental validation

“…The experiments illustrate the high performance of the proposed filtering algorithm with respect to different filtering alternatives. The following advantages are reported: (i) There is no substantial delay in the filtered signal; (ii) high robustness properties with respect to corrupting noises, with no need of knowing their statistical properties; (iii) high attenuation of the noise effects; (iv) the algorithm is computed on-line and in real time; (v) Versatility and ease of implementation and; (vi) it can be robustly applied to a wide range of real engineering applications, such as the buoyancy of a submerged platform [34], the control of robotic systems [35][36][37][38][39] or the control of electronic converters [40]. Moreover, the design of novel architectures, using reconfigurable logic, to accelerate the algebraic filtering and achieve real-time performance in combination with the search of a criterion to automatically define the period of the resetting of the algorithm is the subject of on going applications.…”

Control of a DC motor using algebraic derivative estimation with real time experiments

“…Finally, this methodology is well suited to confronting important problems of control systems. Its versatility and ease of implementation make the controller suitable to be robustly applied in a wide range of real engineering applications such as the buoyancy control of a submerged platform [34], the control of stair-climbing mobility systems [35][36][37][38][39][40][41] or the control of electronic converters [42]. This will be the topic of our future publications.…”

Robust output feedback control for the trajectory tracking of robotic wheelchairs

“…Future work will be devoted to verifying the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm through to use on experiments on a real platform (which is currently under construction) and its application to reconfigurable stair-climbing mobility systems. [31][32][33][34][35][36][37] …”