Design And Realization Of New Wheel - Rafting Wheelchair

As the acceleration of aging and increase of disabled people have brought a huge influence on social and economic development, more and more studies on mobility assistant devices for old and disabled people are made. With the largest population in the world, China has a more urgent demand for the mobility assistant devices. However, common mobility assistant devices can only be used on flat ground and are not equipped with the function like climbing stairs or overcoming obstacles. Although some foreign devices can climb stairs, most of them have deficiencies or are too expensive for consumers. In order to improve solicitude for old and disabled people and solve their problems, starting from the function requirement and the perspective of economic development level in China, this paper presented and realized a novel stair-climbing wheelchair which can be used both on flat ground and stairs.We presented the overall design of the stair-climbing wheelchair, including requirement analysis, design principle, main technical parameters and solution of mechanical structure and control system.The three-dimensional model of the stair-climbing wheelchair was accomplished with SolidWorks and the key parts were analyzed by FEM based on ANSYS Workbench. From the perspective of modular design, we established the control system. The type selection of MCU, motors and sensors was made and the control program of stair-climbing wheelchair was written.We described the wheel-based and track-based mobile modes as well as their switching mode and analyzed the processes of switching and climbing stairs in details. The mechanics model of the switching mechanism and significant stages in stair-climbing process were discussed and presented. An evaluation method of stair-climbing stability was proposed based on the forwards tumbling analysis.We implemented the experiments based on the manufactured prototype, including the wheel-based motion on flat ground and track-based motion on stairs as well as their switching. The data gained from the experiments were compared and analyzed and the results verified the effectiveness of the stair-climbing wheelchair.