The Sustainability Of Powered Wheelchairs: Yet Another Argument Toward Autonomous Transportation

What the disabled community has discovered over the years is that power chairs are much more than medical equipment; they function, both figuratively and literally, as sustainable transportation. The formula that our committee has found, in terms of overall running dynamics on power chair platforms, is one that says that the workload has to be underneath the chair's actual running speed, but that the running speed can never exceed the actual workload, or wattage.

This is mostly because with Permobil's front-to-mid drive as our test layout, we found a substantial amount of rear tipper vibration, in environments where the top speed matched the vehicle's actual watt output, or workload.

That language can be further translated to the bus, rail and paratransit networks. With conventional buses and vans, you always have human error, but if that same bus or van was fully-autonomous, then you would have no human vision or judgement at all.

The ideal solution is to have both, so by building a paratransit system that's both capable of being autonomous and driven, you can have real human judgement, but without the error component attached.