Dynamics Mimicking—Enabling Robot Operation for Wheelchair Users

This paper introduces the concept of dynamics mimicking and explores its potential to operate a robotic platform from a wheelchair. Conventional wheelchairs often exhibit limited maneuverability on difficult terrains such as staircases, steep inclines, and low-friction surfaces like sand or snow. Although various advanced wheelchair designs have been developed to address these limitations, they often require significant adaptation by users. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel approach that enables wheelchair users to control a carrier platform. By mounting the user’s wheelchair onto the carrier platform, the system mimics the wheelchair’s movements to generate control commands for the carrier platform. A dynamics-mimicking device was designed to interface between the wheelchair and the carrier platform, capturing the wheelchair’s kinematics and translating them into commands that guide the platform’s movements. Independence from the type of wheelchair and wheelchair control interface allows users with specialized or personalized control interfaces to operate the carrier platform. First, a kinematic analysis is performed to ensure that, under some constraints, the proposed concept is suitable for different wheelchairs, control/interface mechanisms, and various carrier platforms. A validation study was conducted, and the experimental results demonstrate the viability of this dynamics-mimicking approach.