Innovative Plug-and-Play System for Electrification of Wheel-Chairs

Abstract

Self-propelled wheelchairs are challenging to drive on off-road routes or require enormous physical effort in situations where the gradient exceeds 8%. For most people, these situations are too strenuous and therefore impractical. This work presents an innovative plug-and-play system to electrify a manual wheelchair. With the constraint of not irreversibly modifying the original wheelchair, a mechanical system is developed to allow motors to turn the rear wheels by friction. Torque and power requirements have been derived by modeling and simulating in Matlab the physical system. To manufacture a working prototype, a control system using standard components is devised, and object-oriented firmware is developed with the C++ programming language. The result is a plug-and-play portable kit that can be adapted to wheelchairs of any size, and the expandable Human-Machine-Interface (HMI) makes it ready to expand the audience that can use it.