Slip Mitigation Control for an Electric Powered Wheelchair

Most wheelchairs have low directional stability due to their wheel-drive system configurations. Hence, when a wheelchair experiences excessive slip, it will create an uncontrollable moment that changes its heading direction, endangering the safety of the wheelchair user. This paper presents an approach to longitudinal slip reduction (or traction control) for an Electric Powered Wheelchair that uses a variable reference model, which is a mass-damper system. The position of a joystick is mapped to force and torque values, which are the input to this model. The output is the desired trajectory, which is fed to a trajectory tracking controller. The key idea is that if slip occurs, the applied torque to the wheels is reduced by decreasing the desired acceleration, which is achieved by changing the parameters of the reference model. In this study, the mass of the reference model is changed. The proposed slip reduction approach is validated via experiments.