Design and Control of a Human-Powered Robotic Personal Mobility Vehicle Prototype

This study proposes “Human-Powered Robotics,” a concept of the intelligent machines driven by the power applied by user directly. The development of the robotic personal mobility vehicle prototype based on this concept is described in this paper. This is a vehicle driven by the operator’s pedaling power, which is capable of servo control of the wheel angle using the powder clutch. Experimental results show that it is possible to perform servo control of the wheels and traveling control including forward/backward/pivot turn, and to stabilize the posture as an inverted pendulum by the operator’s pedaling power.