Researches for advanced mobility and safety of an electric small vehicle

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For the research topic entitled "Researches for innovative mobility and safety of a small electric vehicle", we dealt with two measure technical issues, 1 : differental drive control of a small electric vehicle, and 2 : application of an omnidirectional mobile system to automobiles.First, for the topic of a differential drive control of a small electric vehicle, we have designed and built a vehicle which has two in-wheel motors in left and right rear wheels to enables differential drive configuration, which chassis is a commercial available small EV. For detecting drive operation of a human driver and motion of the vehicle, we put sensors such as potentiometers on steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, and shaft encoders on the drive wheels. The prototype vehicle with the developed model based wheel velocity control realizes efficient drive 30% better than the vehicle with no control.Next, we developed a car type omnidirectional vehicle on which the omnidirectional mobile technology is applied. The vehicle equips with two active-casters on the front side as a drive wheels and two passive casters on the rear wheels that forms four wheel car like configuration. For the operation device, a normal wheel, gas and brake pedals are used together with some auxiliary switches for controlling independent 3D motion of the vehicle. We prepared two drive mode one of which is 2D mode which realizes normal car like motion, the other is 3D mode which allows full independent 3D movements to the vehicle body, back and forth, sideways and rotation. The center of rotation (COR) can be located anywhere by software and changed by the human driver. This change of COR enables very flexible motions such as forklift motion, normal car motion and all wheel steering motion.