High speed segway control with series elastic actuator for driving stability improvement

Recently, Segway has been developed continuously for intelligent mobile vehicles and the performance of Segway is being enhanced. In particular, high-speed Segway must be controlled for maintaining stability in dangerous situations. Therefore, safety factors during driving situation have been considered seriously. In most of the developments and studies on Segway, however, the optimization and improvement of the controller component have been tackled and there are few studies on the safety devices and the stability of driving. Therefore, in this research we focus on the control of the SEA to improve the driving stability of high-speed Segway. The impact and vibration generated from the ground due to uneven road surfaces considerably influence the driving safety. So, by measuring and compensating for the external forces transmitted to the Segway using the SEA, a comfort of the driver can be improved and better driving stability can be ensured. By linear and curved path driving experiments, the performance of the proposed algorithm to improve the stability has been verified.