Stable Autonomous Robotic Wheelchair Navigation in the Environment With Slope Way

Abstract

In this article, we present a path planning approach that is capable of generating a feasible trajectory for stable robotic wheelchair navigation in the environment with slope way. Firstly, the environment is modeled by a lightweight navigation map, with which the proposed sampling-based path planning scheme with a modified extension function can generate a feasible path. Then, the path is further optimized by the proposed utility function involving the human comfort and the path cost. To improve the searching efficiency of an optimal trajectory, we present an adaptive weighting Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) based sampling strategy. Particularly, the weights of the components in GMM are adjusted adaptively in the planning process. It is also worth noting that the proposed sampling-based planning paradigm can indicate the unsafe regions in the navigation map, which forms a traversable map and further guarantees the safety of the wheelchair robot navigation. Furthermore, the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed path planning method are verified in both simulation and real-world experiments.