Class: Engineering Design and Problem Solving
Partners: Justin Poserio, Ashli Gonzalez, Abiyaz Chowdhury, Harrison Zhao

Groups within this section designed and made attachments to an electric wheelchair to benefit the wheelchair user and make their daily lives more comfortable.

Canopy Group
My specific group focused on designing an automated canopy system for the user to deploy to protect from sun and rain.

Current Problems to Solve
Current wheelchair canopy designs took up a large amount of room while deploying, like a full 270 degree rotation, or needed to be manually attached. Issues with this are that the wheelchair user may be inside a confined space or may not have the ability to manually attach the canopy by themselves. Also, we wanted to make sure that the wheelchair user could be shielded from the sun and rain with the same one canopy.

Design
Our solution was to make a canopy that was automated by motors. To deal with the issue of enclose spaces, we designed a system that would first lift the canopy vertically, and then deploy the canopy to cover the user, so that the canopy does not hit any objects behind the wheelchair while deploying. To deal with the issue of protection from sun and rain, we made the canopy half opaque, and half clear, so that the user can control how far the canopy comes down if they only needed to block sunlight.

Other groups assembled an automated desk, a cart that could swivel around for the user to store items in, a height raising system to reach higher objects, and light/camera display to let the user see in the dark and show what is behind them.