The Wheelchair Bots

We have wanted to build a wheelchair robot for some time now. The wheelchair part was the first hurdle. We're playing with a pretty lean budget. Thankfully, we found a friend who had a couple of electric wheelchairs and wanted to clear up some space in his garage. We've started to dig into the first and it's looking good so far!

We've tentatively named the first Rogue, and will be using him as our learning platform. He's being built on a Jazzy 1120 chassis, which has a very nice and solid four-post design for drop-on platforms on top. Our main objective is to use him as a Sherpa to haul our stuff to and from events we attend. We've got a list of wishes, and just need to figure out what we can afford and what we can integrate without too much pain.

We've got the basic info we need so we can hack the joystick, but we're not sure whether that's our best approach. The built-in brain is pretty small, but it comes with some pretty elaborate and unnecessary wiring, and the connectors and serial communication protocols are proprietary. At first blush, we're considering the Sabertooth 2X25 since it gives us quite a lot of flexibility as we try different control schemes. The original configuration has a 50A circuit breaker, so has obviously performed at less than 25A per motor. Otherwise, the breaker would trip when running full-speed forward.

Here's a link to the progress on Rogue
Once we start playing with him, the progress on Minion will be here...