Comparative analysis of obstacle avoidance sensors based on assistive intelligent wheel chair

Abstract

With the advent of an aging society and the increase in the number of physically disabled people, the pressure faced by medical escorts is gradually increasing. At the same time, since technology is developing rapidly, how to apply wheelchairs to assist the elderly and the disabled has become an urgent problem at this stage. Among them, intelligent wheelchairs with obstacle avoidance function are gradually improving the daily life of the lower limb disability, and the method of obstacle avoidance for intelligent wheelchairs is mainly based on distance measurement technology, and according to the safe distance to determine whether the obstacle affects the security of operator or not, to effectively avoid crashing and falling. The paper introduces six types of obstacle avoidance methods based on different distance measurement sensors: ultrasonic obstacle avoidance, binocular vision obstacle avoidance, structured light obstacle avoidance, Infrared ranging module based on Triangulation and Time of Flight(TOF) method obstacle avoidance, and Light Detection And Ranging(LiDAR) obstacle avoidance. Then it divides them into two categories based on the different principles of distance measurement, collects various parameter information from the official websites of different brands of various sensors, compares their performance parameters, elaborates the working principles of distance measurement, states the advantages as well as limitations of different kinds of sensors, looks forward to their development direction at the end of this paper.