Development of Microcontroller based Light Following Emergency Evacuation Chair

Abstract

Emergency evacuation is required for fast evacuation of people during disaster. In this paper, we develop a light following emergency evacuation chair to rescue and evacuate physically weak or disable people. The light following evacuation chair includes proximity detection and obstacle avoidance features in order to avoid collision. The chair follows the light sources fixed at different turn points in the Emergency exit track to determine the route and direction to the Emergency exit. We develop the Light Follower using light dependent resistors (LDRs). A motor driver circuit is used to control the direction of the chair depending on response of the LDRs. We use ultrasonic sensor and the motor driver to develop the proximity detector and obstacle avoidance system. A micro-controller is used to control the operation of LDRs, untrasonic sensor and the motor driver. We simulate the performance of the Evacuation chair in forward, left and right direction using an Emergency exit route model and verify its accuracy for different angle of arrival (AoA) of the incident light. We observe an average movement accuracy of 93% in all directions for all AoA of light.