Evaluation of Human Psychological Load Assuming Driving Operation of Sit-Riding Type Wheeled Inverted Pendulum PMV

For sit-riding type wheeled inverted pendulum personal mobility vehicle (WIPPMV), a rider operates it in a sitting posture and a weight-shifting motion is achieved by only rotating an upper-body around a waist. This causes a drop of acceleration and deceleration ability of the PMV, as more, a rider feels anxious when the PMV inclines back and forth while accelerating and decelerating. To cope these issues, it is important to know rider's psychological load while driving the PMV in a sitting posture and to adopt the characteristics in a driving controller of the PMV. In this study, preliminary experiments on the degree of anxiety felt by a rider according to the tilt angle and angular velocity of a seat was examined. The experiment was conducted with an experimental system that has a seat tilted by a human motion or a linear actuator, which imitates a seat of WIPPMV. Through the experiments, it was found that subjects feel considerable anxiety when the tilt angle exceeds 9 degrees in a positive direction and −8 degrees in a negative direction. As more, they did not feel anxiety within 4 degree/s of tilt speed, but felt anxiety when it exceeded 12 degree/s in an active and a passive operation method. These results could be adopted to a driving control of sit-riding type WIPPMV to reduce anxiety of a rider and to improve comfortability.