Ubiquitous Visual Navigation for the Robotic Wheelchair

Abstract

A new Robotic Wheelchair System (RWS) is presented. The new RWS departs completely from the conventional approaches of autonomous robots which rely on onboard sensors to map locally their environment for navigating progressively and autonomously. Instead, our RWS makes use of an innovative tracking and servoing system to achieve global and reliable navigation of robotic wheelchairs. The UVSS enables visual feedback control of robotic wheelchair in a global environment. Furthermore it coordinates with an onboard autonomous control system, whose purpose is to avoid the obstacles in the neighborhood of the wheelchair and to enable navigation when the global control from RWS is not available due to delays and packets dropouts in the communication channel. In addition to servoing and navigation, the RWS also provides continuous communication between the wheelchair riders and their supporters. To test the proposed system, experiments for servoing the robotic wheelchair in following a designed path under UVSS is performed. Experimental results validates the advantage of the new system.KeywordsRobotic wheelchairUbiquitous visual navigationTrackingRemote control