Fine Motion Planning for Shared Wheelchair Control: Requirements and Preliminary Experiments

Abstract

Many elderly and disabled people today experience difficulties when manoeuvring an electric wheelchair. In order to help these people, several heuristic navigation algorithms have been devised in the past. However, in order to make the chair fast and reactive, the wheelchair’s dimensions, non-holonomic and dynamic constraints are often only approximately taken into account. Consequently, these robotic wheelchairs may and do fail in executing the very same manoeuvres with which the elderly and disabled have problems. A possible approach to tackle this problem, is to use a fine motion planner that takes the kinematic and dynamic constraints explicitly into account. This paper discusses the requirements for such wheelchair fine motion planners. Also, an enhanced version of a previously developed planner for autonomous robots is presented, and it is evaluated for use on wheelchairs. 1