Development of agent-based autonomous robotic wheelchair control systems

In this paper, the intelligent and agent-based autonomous robotic wheelchair controller is proposed. The proposed agent-based autonomous robotic wheelchair control system consists of the functions of path planning, navigation and obstacle avoidance. In this work, the A* algorithm is used to develop the path planning module; the fuzzy logic is used to develop the obstacle avoidance and comfortable wheelchair motion control. Especially, the fuzzy fusion method is used to integrate the proposed fuzzy agent model. Finally, several cases of the individual agent execution, fuzzy module fusion, path planning, and wheelchair coordination are discussed, and the simulation results show that the proposed autonomous robotic wheelchair controller achieves the desired objectives. In addition, the agent-based design increases the model integrability and maintability.