Evaluation of the Mobility Performance of a Personal Mobility Vehicle for Steps

There is increasing demand for continued development in personal mobility vehicles, because many people want to use them to improve their life. For example, wheelchair users, including people with disabilities, need powered wheelchairs for their daily activities, and elderly people expect to use mobile platforms for better quality of life. There are two main research targets for these types of vehicles: more intelligence and higher mobility performance. This paper discusses the latter topic. The vehicle proposed in this paper has high mobility performance on rough terrain; notably, it has the capability of traversing steps obliquely, even though conventional vehicles are supposed to move on steps only from the very front of the steps, not obliquely. Its performance for climbing up/down steps is evaluated in this paper, which is an evaluation for climbing up steps that consists of seven patterns of approach angles to the step for one step and two steps. Tests for climbing down steps were also conducted. Through those tests, the ability of our vehicle to traverse steps obliquely was confirmed.