Development of a foldable personal mobility vehicle with one drive wheel

As a form of new transportation, cooperation of Personal Mobility Vehicles (PMVs) and a public transportation facility attracts attention from a viewpoint of an environmental load. Various compact PMVs adopting the attitude control technology of an inverted pendulum have been already developed. However, it is reported that attitude control becomes unstable under the influence of road surface irregular and level difference in the vehicle using this attitude control. Thus, a foldable three-wheel style PMV is developed in this research. By folding up, carrying into a public transportation facility called a railroad or a bus becomes easy. Moreover, static stability is sustained to the body by being grounded with a total of three wheels, two of which are used in front part whereas one is used in rear part. This needs no introduction of attitude control, which is to make the attitude stable under the influence of a road surface, so that the risk of a fall of a driver can be reduced. Furthermore, the number of sensors and the number of motors can be reduced by setting not to use attitude control and a drive wheel to one. Thereby, the manufacture cost of the body can be held down. Therefore, it is economical, so that it is thought that general spread is easy. This paper reports the outline and design of hardware to be developed, the running speed control technique, and some running performance experiments to be conducted. (paper)