So I began pursuing old beat-up power wheelchairs. Finally, my waiting and looking paid off and I obtained a relatively modern older power chair called the Mini Jazzy. It could pull a 250 pound person up a 5% grade, so it should have no problem with a 60 pound grandchild or probably even a 160 pound grampa. For a month or so, I underwent subtle humiliation when my wife would announce to friends that I had a wheelchair! It's a Robot, I insisted having even taken off the chair. Finally, I could take it no longer so I decided to build out enough of a robot to put it into a controlled loop Forward, Backward, Left, Right, and Stop. This is the first step to almost any robot project I've done. I would have a robot! No wheelchair for me.
Follow the Link to the How-To build a robot from a power wheelchair on CwhatIcanDo.com.
Because of all the research I had to do (the web doesn't give up much help on this subject) I decided to make my goal a little bigger than just making a fun bot that doesn't do too much to help anyone, just to entertain myself. So I decided I would make it so you could still control the wheelchair even with the robotic control. Now a disabled person could bring the power chair to them from across the way.
I could even put sensors on it so it could assist another person in ushering a handicapped person in a crowd, just like I discovered the Japanese doing. In fact, I decided it would be more fun to create something that could help out handicapped people than to make an IED "sniffer". It's more fun to make love than war. So this project is what you might call my Robot Love Project...
