Design of seat mechanism for multi-posture-controllable wheelchair

This paper proposes a design of seat mechanism for a wheelchair to be controllable multi-postures such as standing, reclining, tilting and elevation. The seat is designed based on a link mechanism including linear actuator, and its kinematics analysis is also presented. To control the multi-postures, we design a PID-based position and speed controller, and a motion planner to generate an available next posture from the present status. Simulation results show that the designed seat mechanism and its planner are applicable to develop the multi-postures-controllable wheelchair.

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