Steering performance of an inverted pendulum vehicle with pedals as a personal mobility vehicle

From the viewpoints of environmental protection, support for the aged and ensuring the right to mobility, there is a need to develop a new type of mobility vehicle that provides more effective transportation. The authors propose an inverted pendulum vehicle with pedals as one of the forms of personal mobility vehicles (PMVs). In this paper, the steering performance of the inverted pendulum vehicle with pedals is discussed based on experiments on a prototype. From the experimental results, it was confirmed that the errors from the five subjects for the target trajectory and the five-grade evaluation of the maneuverability were similar. Finally, we created an inverted pendulum vehicle with pedals to which was added a reaction actuator for the steering system. From the experimental results, it was found that setting appropriate feedback gains for the handle steering angle and its rate of rotation, which control the right and left wheel driving torques, resulted in greatly improved maneuverability.