CasteriX: A Wheel Configurable Caster Wheel-Based Prototype Design for Electric Wheelchair Motion Dynamics Research
A.G. Tharindu Gimras, A.G.B.P. Jayasekara
Abstract
While Electric Wheelchairs (EW) usage is rising in the modern world, challenges related to insufficient motion precision are becoming more prominent. Therefore, it's crucial to analyze EW's motion dynamics behavior with different wheel configurations. When considering EWs with non-reconfigurable caster wheels, most prior studies rely on a particular wheel configuration type EW for each study. Thus, understanding those EW's motion dynamics for different wheel configurations while keeping other parameters constant is challenging. Hence, it's notable that to overcome that issue, a wheel configurable EW research platform needed to be designed. Although there is an attempt to design a wheel configurable EW platform, it didn't have configurability in caster wheel arrangements. In order to solve that issue, this paper proposes a prototype wheel configurable modular robot research platform named CasteriX, which can be used for EWs with non-reconfigurable caster wheel motion dynamic analysis studies. CasteriX provides configurability in caster-wheel sizes and in both caster and drive-wheel positions while featuring a scalable, low-cost, modular design. It supports 212 wheel configurations covering the three major EW types and can be extended to robot wheel configurations with more than four caster wheels. To align with the quantitative characteristics of the reference Jazzy EW, the scale ratio is preserved throughout the design process. Moreover, to validate the qualitative characteristics, two main motion studies were conducted. The first one is to compare the reference Jazzy Air EW model and CasteriX motion studies, and the second one is to understand the complexity of motion studies by operating CasteriX under selected wheel configurations.
Keywords
Cite this paper
Gimras, A. G. Tharindu, & Jayasekara, A. G. B. P. (2026). CasteriX: A Wheel Configurable Caster Wheel-Based Prototype Design for Electric Wheelchair Motion Dynamics Research. In ICIPRoB 2026 — IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIPRoB69625.2026.11497999
A. G. Tharindu Gimras, A. G. B. P. Jayasekara, "CasteriX: A Wheel Configurable Caster Wheel-Based Prototype Design for Electric Wheelchair Motion Dynamics Research," in ICIPRoB 2026 — IEEE, 2026. doi: 10.1109/ICIPRoB69625.2026.11497999.
@inproceedings{gimras2026casterix,
title = {CasteriX: A Wheel Configurable Caster Wheel-Based Prototype Design for Electric Wheelchair Motion Dynamics Research},
author = {A.G. Tharindu Gimras, A.G.B.P. Jayasekara},
booktitle = {ICIPRoB 2026 — IEEE},
year = {2026},
publisher = {IEEE},
doi = {10.1109/ICIPRoB69625.2026.11497999},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11497999/},
}Related Publications
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