THE ENGINEERING students and staff at Kangan Batman Institute of TAFE have developed a power wheelchair by using AutoCAD and Inventor technology.
The project was chaired by Colin Johanson, who is both a co-ordinator at the TAFE and co-founder of COOL Mobility. A quadriplegic himself, he believed mobility aids should be attractive, light and use advanced technology to obtain optimum performance.
The Kangan Roo wheelchair has five points of contact with the ground, and is built of aluminium, stainless steel, composites and titanium.
The frame design allows the chair to be adjusted for tight indoor manoeuvring or outdoor cruising at speeds of up to 10km/h. The 3D pipe designs were created within AutoCAD, although it was challenging to find 3D pipe lisp routines and add-ons.
Another challenge arose when Johanson visited the United States for collaboration purposes, which created cross-format difficulties. Design data and drawings had to be shared with global design teams, who were not using Autodesk products.
The team turned to Autodesk Inventor, which is said to provide a natural progression to move from the 2D and limited 3D capabilities to AutoCAD to full design creation.
According to Johanson, the software allows sketching in 3D directly and development in a full 3D environment. The design can be inspected from any angle at any time, and stress analysis can also be applied.
The design team also lauded the support efforts of vendor IMAGINiT, which provided individualised help and ensured design data between the US and Australian groups were compatible for sharing.
At the time of writing, the wheelchair is at its third prototype stage, and is close to being available as a commercial product. It will use rare earth magnet motors supplied by CATEA of Georgia Tech and nickel metal hydride batteries from Cobasys.
A video of the wheelchair can be seen here: