Abstract Summary
Partial power assistance is a promising approach to reduce the deleterious upper extremity loads in manual wheelchair locomotion. This study investigates two potential control strategies to govern the wheelchair-user interaction: i) an impedance control strategy, where a reference, desired system dynamics is imposed; ii) a feedback-based parameter modification scheme where key parameters such as apparent mass and friction are altered as desired. This paper compares these approaches in the light of predictive simulation results obtained by solving optimal control problems using a model of the controlled wheelchair-user system.
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