Human-oriented design of autonomous navigation assisted robotic wheelchair for indoor environments

Wheelchair is one of the most important mobility aids for the disabled people and elders. In this paper, we propose the human-oriented robotic wheelchair design and implementation based on the considerations of convenient driving in narrow space with non-straight paths, active collision avoidance, autonomous navigation, real-time user joystick command justification, intelligent fusion of user joystick command and autonomous navigation systems, and remote monitoring and control. Therefore, this work emphasizes the human-centered manipulations instead of fully autonomous operations of the wheelchair. The developed software components are desired to further detect and avoid mistakes from wrong manipulations of users. In addition, the controllability and comfortability of the wheelchair can be also improved. Especially, the omni-wheeled mechanical platform significantly increases the driving mobility when the robotic wheelchair moves in narrow spaces of indoor environments. Finally, the mechanical platform, closed-loop motion controller, power drives and intelligent software components are all developed in laboratory. The robotic wheelchair was successfully tested. The experimental results validated the proposed robotic wheelchair, and they were discussed in this paper.