Mobility assistance system for an electric wheelchair using annotated maps

Abstract

An electric wheelchair is very useful for physically challenged or elderly people. A electric wheelchair can be equipped with a computer and sensors such as cameras and LIDARs to make it a robotic wheelchair. This opens the possibility to reduce the burden and increase the comfort of the users with use of robotics technology. In this paper, we begin with a dynamic shared control and propose to use a map with annotations to increase the user's comfort while keeping safety. We provide a system with localization, which can relate the current position of the wheelchair to the annotations. Both quantitative evaluation and subjective survey demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.