Robust and precise platoon driving control of welfare vehicles along wheel track by using model error compensator

In hospitals and care facilities, the care workers have to take care of many patients riding on a wheelchair for a stroll. The welfare vehicles like electric wheelchairs will take important roles not only to improve the quality of life of patients but also to reduce the load of care workers. The platoon driving of the wheelchair systems may become one of the effective leading methods of patients. Although the platoon driving systems for automobiles was widely studied assuming a straight road which has good visibility, the systems for welfare vehicles have been scarcely tried in a narrow corridor corner of care facilities. It is a reason of difficulty that the radius of curvature on the driving trajectory is very small and complicated in the buildings. There are two important purposes for the platoon of wheelchairs to drive in the narrow space. One is to design the precise steering controller keeping safe inter-vehicle distance. The other is to construct the robust controller which suppresses the influence of the parameter variation like the passenger´s weight. In this paper, a novel robust platoon driving control system for the narrow space is proposed. The proposed controller consists of the inter-vehicle distance control with the model error compensator and the steering control with way-points along the wheel track of the preceding vehicle. The effectiveness is evaluated by the driving experiments in a narrow corridor corner.