Improved secure navigation of wheelchairs using multi-robot system and cloud computing technologies

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel approach for secure navigation of wheelchairs. The approach is based on a combination of robotic road train based navigation and Cloud Computing technologies. The navigation strategy is inspired from elephants. Marching trunk to tail, each wheelchair in a platoon takes cues from the wheelchair just in front of it. The wheelchair also communicates directly with the leader in order to anticipate any turns or braking action. The cloud computing technologies are used to perform shared computations and remote teleoperation by a caregiver. Caregivers are persons connected through cloud interfaces. Their role is to watch in real time the navigation progress and to control the system navigation when problems occur. Some experimental results are given in the paper to demonstrate the feasibility and performance of the developed system.