Intelligent Wheel Research Articles

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

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.

Real-time detection of wheel-rail conditions in a monorail vehicle-track nonlinear system based on vehicle vibration signals

This paper aims to propose a real-time detection method of wheel-rail conditions in a monorail vehicle-track nonlinear system based on vehicle vibration signals. Monorail rubber tires exhibit strong nonlinearity and three-dimensional elasticity, resulting in highly coupled vertical and lateral vibrations. As a result, traditional methods applied in railway system such as transfer function analysis are not suitable for back-calculation of road irregularities for this nonlinear system. Iterative simulation with numerous parameters is time-consuming, thus this paper proposes a parallel simulation approach fused with the genetic algorithm to shorten the calculation time and facilitate big data processing. The multi-rigid body model’s simulation result can closely match the test data by intelligently modifying the vehicle parameters. This method overcomes the transfer function’s limitations in nonlinear systems and the significant errors introduced by the simplified mathematical derivation method. It also overcomes the shortcoming of significant errors in the mathematical derivation method and disperses errors caused by simplifying the multi-rigid body dynamics and ensures calculation accuracy. Additionally, this paper highlights the application of artificial intelligence techniques in intelligent wheel eccentricity detection. It improves the traditional algorithm to shorten the calculation time and benefit big data processing.

Implementation of Artificial Intelligence Wheel Chair for Differently-abled Person

The vehicle is designed by taking into consideration of the physically challenged people especially the paraplegic patients. These people are living in our vicinity with paralyzed legs, their mode of transport from one place to another is through the wheel chairs. The normal wheel chair has to be operated manually with more man power, this eventually makes tiresome for people to cover long distances, in order to overcome such hardships faced by those people artificial intelligent wheel chair is proposed work. The vehicle is being controlled by the analog sensors fitted in the patient’s hand. The device used here is an accelerometer MPU 6050 sensor. The arduino nano board and arduino uno board is acting as an interface between the accelerometer and RF transmitter, DC gear motor and the RF receiver respectively. Coding is developed be the principles of accelerometer in x, y and z directions. The vehicle moves in all four direction according to the gesture of the patient. On the whole the vehicle is patient friendly and cost efficient.

Design and experimental study of a piezoelectric energy harvester in automotive spokes

In order to supply power for the wireless sensors in wheels, a piezoelectric energy harvester installed in spokes is proposed in this paper. The piezoelectric cantilever beam is fixed in the spoke, which has higher practicability than the method mentioned in the related research. The periodic excitation is generated by the gravity effect of the free-end mass in the rotation, and the safety limiting structure is designed. A dynamic model was derived through the Euler–Lagrange method and verified by experiments. Based on the numerical simulation of the model, the parameter design of the harvester was carried out in detail for the R16 size rim. In order to verify the performance, an experimental platform was built with piezoelectric composite fiber materials. The influence of the limiters on the steady state and the sweep response was studied, and the energy harvesting effect was further tested by the experiment on the road. The results show that the harvester designed can obtain 82–1003 μW energy at 50–70 km h−1, which provides the possibility of establishing a self-sufficient intelligent wheel system without maintenance.

An intelligent monitoring system of grinding wheel wear based on two-stage feature selection and Long Short-Term Memory network

Grinding wheel condition is considered as the key factor affecting grinding performance, and therefore, accurate monitoring of wheel wear is necessary to prevent the deterioration of part quality. An intelligent wheel wear monitoring system is introduced in this article to realize processing of grinding signal, extraction of signal features, selection of optimal feature subset, and prediction of wheel wear. Physical information generated during the grinding of C-250 maraging steel is collected by a dynamometer, accelerometer, and acoustic emission sensor, and a large quantity of features in time domain and frequency domain are extracted from the processed grinding signals. To reduce feature redundancy and increase relevancy of feature to wheel wear, a two-stage feature selection approach combining filter and wrapper framework is proposed. The filter preselects individual features by minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance method, while the wrapper evaluates different feature subsets by the model performance. A deep learning network structure named Long Short-Term Memory network is adopted to develop the wheel wear monitoring model and is compared with a conventional machine learning algorithm, Random Forest. The results have shown that the two-stage feature selection method is able to provide the globally optimal feature subset for the model. Long Short-Term Memory model achieves an R2 of 0.994 and a root-mean-square error of 0.240 with four features, while Random Forest model obtains an R2 of 0.980 and a root-mean-square error of 0.463 with seven features, which indicates that Long Short-Term Memory model is capable of predicting wheel wear more accurately even with less features.

LRFを用いた電動パーソナルモビリティ操縦システム

Be anticipated to become super aging society, many research works about welfare support have been done. Among them, there are many attempts to develop the intelligent wheel chair to support the movement of physically handicapped person. In our research, we paid our attention to the movement that a motor-cycle rider moves his/her head naturally and is going to turn to the desired direction, try to develop the simplified detection method of non-contact and non-constraining operator's upper body motion to maneuver the electric wheelchair without the influence of brightness of the surroundings. In addition, we develop interface to feed back the maneuvering status of the wheelchair. Improve operability by developing feedback interfaces.

An Intelligent Mouse Wheel-Design Concept and Application

The virtually multiple mouse wheels is a new input device; however, as it has not yet been supported by application software, the left scroll and right scroll can only operate a few software functions. In this study, computer software is combined with a virtually multiple mouse wheel to intercept left and right scroll signals in the background, which are converted into the start signal of software and sent to the application software in order that software functions can be operated. The left scroll and right scroll operate the preset function, and the user software interface implemented in this study enables the user to set the function to be operated, thus, meeting different users' requirements. In addition, the software interface can detect the software of the mouse cursor, and the mouse wheel function is automatically adjusted according to the software. This mouse wheel not only senses the different scroll positions of the finger, it also automatically distinguishes different software environments, which provides diversified software function responses, thus, it is called the intelligent mouse wheel.

Adapted Control Methods for Cerebral Palsy Users of an Intelligent Wheelchair

The development of an intelligent wheel chair (IW) platform that may be easily adapted to any commercial electric powered wheelchair and aid any person with special mobility needs is the main objective of the IntellWheels project. To be able to achieve this main objective, three distinct control methods were implemented in the IW: manual, shared and automatic. Several algorithms were developed for each of these control methods. This paper presents three of the most significant of those algorithms with emphasis on the shared control method. Experiments were performed by users suffering from cerebral palsy, using a realistic simulator, in order to validate the approach. The experiments revealed the importance of using shared (aided) controls for users with severe disabilities. The patients still felt having complete control over the wheelchair movement when using a shared control at a 50 % level and thus this control type was very well accepted. Thus it may be used in intelligent wheelchairs since it is able to correct the direction in case of involuntary movements of the user but still gives him a sense of complete control over the IW movement.

1P2-N-035 自律走行機能を持つインテリジェント車いすの開発(第3報) : RFID,レーザレンジセンサ等の外界センサ情報を用いた絶対位置認識(愛知万博ロボットの最先端技術,生活を支援するロボメカ技術のメガインテグレーション)

1P2-N-035 自律走行機能を持つインテリジェント車いすの開発(第3報) : RFID,レーザレンジセンサ等の外界センサ情報を用いた絶対位置認識(愛知万博ロボットの最先端技術,生活を支援するロボメカ技術のメガインテグレーション)

1P2-N-033 自律走行機能を持つインテリジェント車いすの開発(第1報) : コンセプトとシステム構成(愛知万博ロボットの最先端技術,生活を支援するロボメカ技術のメガインテグレーション)

1P2-N-033 自律走行機能を持つインテリジェント車いすの開発(第1報) : コンセプトとシステム構成(愛知万博ロボットの最先端技術,生活を支援するロボメカ技術のメガインテグレーション)

1P2-N-034 自律走行機能を持つインテリジェント車いすの開発(第2報) : サーバの支援による高精度位置決め(愛知万博ロボットの最先端技術,生活を支援するロボメカ技術のメガインテグレーション)

1P2-N-034 自律走行機能を持つインテリジェント車いすの開発(第2報) : サーバの支援による高精度位置決め(愛知万博ロボットの最先端技術,生活を支援するロボメカ技術のメガインテグレーション)

Vision Based Intelligent Wheel Chair Control: The Role of Vision and Inertial Sensing in Topological Navigation

AbstractThis paper describes ongoing research on vision based mobile robot navigation for wheel chairs. After a guided tour through a natural environment while taking images at regular time intervals, natural landmarks are extracted to automatically build a topological map. Later on this map can be used for place recognition and navigation. We use visual servoing on the landmarks to steer the robot. In this paper, we investigate ways to improve the performance by incorporating inertial sensors. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Autonomous Rolling Method of Intelligent Wheel Chair Using the Teaching and Q-learning

In this paper, we propose an autonomous rolling method of intelligent wheel chair (IWC) using the teaching and Q-learning. In the proposed method, first, IWC learns a run path. Next, IWC corrects a position gap around the teaching point by using Q-learning. When detection of the teaching point goes wrong by the noise to motors, IWC cannot reach to the destination. The proposed method is applied to the task which runs a passage, and the simulation results show that IWC repeats a cutback and corrects a position gap. Furthermore, the simulation results show that IWC corrects a position gap more certainly by using the data learned in the environment with the noise to motors.

State Space Composition Technique for Intelligent Wheel Chair Adapting to Environment.

This paper describes a state space composition technique for the adaptation to environment in the autonomous behavior of intelligent wheel chair (IWC).In the product like IWC with actual sensors, composing state space is difficult problem since environmental information can not be observed sufficiently from restricted sensor inputs.A lot of states observed from same environment position raise the fail of the learning and adaptation with active learning approach.In order to compensate for the effects of the sensor configuration, that is sensor position, angle and precision, a normalization processing of position detector is introduced.In sensor normalization process, IWC scans present environment via range sensors with executing spot-turn, and prepare scan-patterns of each sensor.Then the normalization process adjusts the phase and dynamic range of each pattern to the reference sensor scan-pattern, analyzing phase differences and scale factors of each pattern against reference pattern.Using phase difference and scale factors, automated state space composition is possible.From the simulation experiment with both artificial and real-worlddraft, the automated state space construction is confirmed as a practical approach for pre-processing for environment learning and adaptation.

Active Guidance of Railway Vehicles Using Traction Motor Torque Control

SUMMARY This paper develops the intelligent wheel concept forwarded by Wickens. A two “wheel-pair” vehicle is considered. The wheel-pair consists of two independent wheels pinned to a frame. The wheels have hub motors that provide the torque for steering as well as traction. A simple controller is applied to demonstrate the performance of the system. The maximum guidance error is shown to be 2 mm on a 54 m radius curve and the vehicle has a critical speed of 108 kph. A discussion of the merits of the system and some practical considerations are entered into.