Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Petry, Marcelo R
• Moreira, Antonio Paulo
• Braga, Rodrigo A M
• Reis, Luis Paulo

Titel

Shared control for obstacle avoidance in intelligent wheelchairs

Ist Teil von

• 2010 IEEE Conference on Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics, 2010, p.182-187

Ort / Verlag

IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Quelle

IEEE Electronic Library Online

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Intelligent wheelchairs operating in dynamic environments need to sense its neighborhood and adapt the control signal, in real-time, to avoid collisions and protect the user. In this paper we propose a robust, real-time obstacle avoidance extension of the classic potential field methodology. Our algorithm is specially adapted to share the wheelchair's control with the user avoiding risky situations. This method relies on the idea of virtual forces, generated by the user command (attractive force) and by the objects detected on each ultrasonic sensor (repulsive forces), acting on the wheelchair. The resultant wheelchair's behavior is obtained by the sum of the attractive force and all the repulsive forces at a given position. Experimental results from drive tests in a cluttered office environment provided statistical evidence that the proposed algorithm is effective to reduce the number of collisions and still improve the user's safety perception.