Intelligent wheelchair moving among people based on their observations

Abstract

With the increase in the number of senior citizens, there is a growing demand for human-friendly wheelchairs as mobility aids. One of the main issues in robotic wheelchair research is autonomous obstacle avoidance for safety. However, this is difficult because most of the moving obstacles in the real world are human beings, and they sometimes change their motion abruptly. This paper presents an intelligent wheelchair that can avoid collisions with such pedestrians (and each other) safely and comfortably. We assume that the information as to whether or not a pedestrian has noticed the wheelchair and which direction he/she wants to go can appear in the direction of the pedestrian's face. Thus, our intelligent wheelchair continuously observes the pedestrian's face in its frontal area, realizing smooth passing by changing its collision-avoidance strategy based on the face information and the range data from ultrasonic sensors. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by a comparative experiment with a method using only ultrasonic sensors.