Development of a Omni-directional Self-Balancing Robot Wheelchair

In this paper, we report a self-balancing robot wheelchair which has the capability of keeping upright posture regardless of the terrain inclination in terms of the three dimensional balancing motion. It has the mobility of five degrees of freedom, where pitching, yawing, and forward motions are generated by the two-wheeled inverted pendulum mechanism and the rolling and vertical motions are implemented by the movement of the tilting mechanism. Several design considerations are suggested for the sliding type vehicle body, wheel actuator module, tilting actuator module, power and control system, and the riding module.