An Intelligent Wheelchair to Enable Safe Mobility of the Disabled People with Motor and Cognitive Impairments

Abstract

In this paper, we develop an Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) system to provide safe mobility to the disabled or elderly people with cognitive and motor impairments. Our IW provides two main functions: obstacle avoidance and situation awareness. Firstly, it detects a variety of obstacles by a combination of a camera and 8 range sensors, and finds the viable paths to avoid the collisions of obstacles based on learning-based classification. Secondly, it categorizes the current situation where a user is standing on as sidewalk, roadway and traffic intersection by analyzing the texture properties and shapes of the images, thus prevents the collisions of vehicle at the traffic intersection. The proposed system was tested on various environments then the results show that the proposed system can recognize the outdoor place types with an accuracy of 98.25% and produce the viable paths with an accuracy of 92.00% on outdoors.