Autonomous Wheelchair: An Assistive Technology for Physically Disabled Persons

Abstract

There are millions of people in the world who are physically disabled including upper or lower limb loss, broken skeletal structure, and damage to different organs of the body. These people face issues in their mobility, due to which they are not able to perform their daily tasks. For the assistance of these disabled people, the autonomous wheelchair based on mobile robotics will be designed. An interface will be constructed between the wheelchair and the computer system using Arduino. The proposed system will get the destination point using the user interface. The proposed system will use Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) to generate a map of the environment. The generated map will be used for path planning and after this, the wheelchair will start moving towards the destination point. The proposed system will detect the obstacles that are present in the path by using the different types of sensors such as ultrasonic, laser sensors, Kinect. The detected obstacles will be avoided by using obstacle avoidance algorithms and the wheelchair will start to navigate on an alternate optimized path. Initially, the system will be implemented on the simulator (RVIZ or Gazebo) before actual implementation in the real world. The model of a wheelchair will be created with the help of Universal Robotic Description Format (URDF). The URDF file will be converted into Simulation Description Format (SDF) file and it will be used to simulate the wheelchair in a virtual environment. The system will enable the disabled patient to move in the environment autonomously.