Abstract
The present work considers the development of a wheelchair for people with special needs, which is capable of navigating semi-autonomously within its workspace. This system is expected to prove useful to people with impaired mobility and limited fine motor control of the upper extremities. Among the implemented behaviors of this robotic system are the avoidance of obstacles, the motion in the middle of the free space and the following of a moving target specified by the user (e.g., a person walking in front of the wheelchair). The wheelchair is equipped with sonars, which are used for distance measurement in preselected critical directions, and with a panoramic camera with a 360 degree field of view, which is used for following a moving target. After suitably processing the color sequence of the panoramic images using the color histogram of the desired target, the orientation of the target with respect to the wheelchair is determined, while its distance is determined by the sonars. The motion control laws developed for the system use the sensory data and take into account the non-holonomic kinematic constraints of the wheelchair, in order to guarantee certain desired features of the closed-loop system, such as stability. Moreover, they are as simplified as possible to minimize implementation requirements. An experimental prototype has been developed at ICS–FORTH, based on a commercially-available wheelchair. The sensors, the computing power and the electronics needed for the implementation of the navigation behaviors and of the user interfaces (touch screen, voice commands) were developed as add-on modules and integrated with the wheelchair.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Argyros, A. A. and Bergholm, F.: Combining central and peripheral vision for reactive robot navigation, in: Proc. of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conf. (CVPR'99), Fort Collins, CO, USA, 23–25 June 1999.
Canudas de Wit, C., Siciliano, B., and Bastin, G. (eds): Theory of Robot Control, Springer, Berlin, 1996.
Collett, T.: Measuring beelines to food, Science 287 (2000), 817–818. SEMI-AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION OF A ROBOTIC WHEELCHAIR 329
Donna, E., Bacon, C., Rahman, T., and Harwin W. S. (eds): Proc. 4th Internat. Conf. on Rehabilitation Robotics, Applied Science and Engineering Lab., Univ. of Delaware/A.I. duPont Inst., Wilmington, DE, USA, 1994.
Foulds, R.: Interactive robotic aids – one option for independent living: An international perspective, Monograph 37, World Rehabilitation Fund, New York, 1986, pp. 7–17.
http://www.ics.forth.gr/~tsakiris.
Khalil, H. K.: Nonlinear Systems, Macmillan, New York, 1992.
Laumond, J.-P. (ed.): Robot Motion Planning and Control, Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences 229, Springer, New York, 1998.
Nayar, S. K. and Baker, S.: A theory of catadioptric image formation, Technical Report CUCS-015-97, Dept. of Computer Science, Columbia Univ., USA, 1997, p. 30.
Samson, C.: Control of chained systems: application to path following and time-varying pointstabilization of mobile robots, IEEE Trans. Automat. Control 40 (1995), 64–77.
Srinivasan, M. V., Zhang, S., Altwein, M., and Tautz, J.: Honeybee navigation: Nature and calibration of the ‘odometer', Science 287 (2000), 851–853.
Svoboda, T., Pajdla, T., and Hlavac, V.: Epipolar geometry for panoramic cameras, in: Proc. 5th European Conf. on Computer Vision, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1406, Springer, New York, 1998.
Swain, M. J. and Ballard, D. H.: Indexing via color histograms, in: Proc. Internat. Conf. on Computer Vision, 1990.
Tsakiris, D. P. and Argyros, A. A.: Corridor following by mobile robots equipped with panoramic cameras, in: Proc. of the 8th IEEE Medit. Conf. on Control and Automation (MED'2000), Rio, Greece, 17–19 July 2000.
Tsakiris, D. P., Rives, P., and Samson, C.: Extending visual servoing techniques to nonholonomic mobile robots, in: G. Hager, D. Kriegman, and S. Morse (eds), The Confluence of Vision and Control, Lecture Notes in Control and Information Systems 237, Springer, New York, 1998.
Vidyasagar, M.: Nonlinear Systems Analysis, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Argyros, A., Georgiadis, P., Trahanias, P. et al. Semi-autonomous Navigation of a Robotic Wheelchair. Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems 34, 315–329 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016371922451
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016371922451