Wheelchair Navigation System for Disabled and Elderly People.

Eun Kim

doi:10.3390/s16111806

Abstract

An intelligent wheelchair (IW) system is developed in order to support safe mobility for disabled or elderly people with various impairments. The proposed IW offers two main functions: obstacle detection and avoidance, and situation recognition. First, through a combination of a vision sensor and eight ultrasonic ones, it detects diverse obstacles and produces occupancy grid maps (OGMs) that describe environmental information, including the positions and sizes of obstacles, which is then given to the learning-based algorithm. By learning the common patterns among OGMs assigned to the same directions, the IW can automatically find paths to prevent collisions with obstacles. Second, it distinguishes a situation whereby the user is standing on a sidewalk, traffic intersection, or roadway through analyzing the texture and shape of the images, which aids in preventing any accidents that would result in fatal injuries to the user, such as collisions with vehicles. From the experiments that were performed in various environments, we can prove the following: (1) the proposed system can recognize different types of outdoor places with 98.3% accuracy; and (2) it can produce paths that avoid obstacles with 92.0% accuracy.

Highlights

With increases in the number of elderly and disabled people, there is growing demand for support devices and care equipment to improve their quality of life
Thereafter, the ground truths for all images were annotated by humans
80,000 images were divided into six datasets according their illumination types, background types, images were divided into six datasets according to their illumination types, background types, and and obstacle types

Summary

Introduction

With increases in the number of elderly and disabled people, there is growing demand for support devices and care equipment to improve their quality of life. The important evaluation factors of such IWs are safety and ease of operation; two basic techniques should be developed for IWs: (1) convenient interactions between the users and the IWs, which allow disabled users to manipulate the wheelchair themselves using their own physical abilities; (2) a navigation service that offers obstacle detection, recognition of surrounding environments and collision avoidance. This paper will discuss the navigation techniques for IWs that allow users with both cognitive and motor impairments to have safer mobility. 3. Data collections used to evaluate the proposed obstacle avoidance method. - Static and DB IIDB Sets - Pin Illumination lighting and Obstacles

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Results

Conclusion