Human Cooperative Wheelchair for Haptic Interaction Based on Dual Compliance Control

A human and a robot will carry out a task which is not attainable by themselves. In particular, a human recognizes environment and plans his trajectory without collision with obstacles. On the other hand, a robot generates a controlled force more than a human. In this paper, the best combination of human ability and robot capacity is considered. Based on force commands from a human, a robot supports it. A reaction torque observer is implemented in a robot to observe an environmental disturbance. Environmental disturbance is classified into translational and rotational direction modes. As a result, adaptive force control in each mode is attained. Dual compliance control is applied to a wheelchair. A wheelchair that has the abilities of power-assist and relaxation of contact force is developed in this paper. As a result, operationality and stability are improved. The numerical and experimental results show the viability of the proposed method.