Development of a power assisting system of a walking chair

In this paper, we discuss the mechanism and control strategy of power assisting systems for the walking chair and then propose a new power assisting system. A power assisting system must reflect a human operator´s intentions and control the assisting motors to generate required driving power. A power assisting system for the walking chair must provide a constant output velocity though human driving has variations of velocity. It must also provide a stable driving torque so that the user does not suffer any discomfort. Therefore, we proposed two types of mechanisms for power combination and compared them through experiments. Finally, we proposed a hybrid power assisting system based on the combination of two types of mechanisms, and experimentally investigated the system´s effectiveness.