Development of autonomous robotic wheelchair controller using embedded systems

Autonomous robotic wheelchairs play important roles to disabled persons or elders. In general, an autonomous robotic wheelchair includes the techniques of obstacle sensing and avoidance, local path navigation, and friendly interactions with users when compared to conventional powered wheelchairs. Most of researches on autonomous robotic wheelchairs used the personal computer as the supervisory controller since its powerful computing capacity and familiar coding environment. Nevertheless, the personal computer is not feasible to the wheelchair users due to inefficient size, lower reliability and larger power consumptions. To promote feasible robotic wheelchair control architecture, the embedded system is surveyed in this paper. By using the embedded computing architecture, the proposed robotic wheelchair controller performs characteristics of compact size, better reliability and lower power consumptions while the benefits of powerful computing capacity and familiar coding environment are maintained. On the other hand, this paper also implements the fuzzy logic based autonomous navigation functions such as goal-seeking, wall-following and obstacle avoidance. Theses fuzzy logic based navigation functions are fused together to solve practical situations of the robotic wheelchairs. Finally, a real robotic wheelchair with three-omni-wheel configuration is constructed based on the proposed control architecture, and several practical experiments are also discussed in this paper.