Autonomous Wheelchair Project

Abstract

Although the electric wheelchairs that are controlled by joysticks have improved the lives of many, there is a group of patients suffering from vision problems, amputation of hands, or quadriplegia that cannot control these chairs. Moreover, navigating electric wheelchairs through crowded environments without crashing into objects or people can be a challenging task. For these reasons, it became necessary to develop the electric wheelchair into autonomous wheelchair .

The user job is to enter commands via the mobile phone, either by voice (the name of a location such as a kitchen , or move forward) or by touch (determine a location on the map or controlling the movement of the chair such as moving forward for example), and after the user enters the command ,and with the help of the stored map The chair can locate it on the map, then locate the goal location, then determine the optimal path to reach the goal while avoiding obstacles.

After the research that we conducted and consulting with some doctors and teachers, it became clear to us that there is more than one way (technology) to obtain an autonomous wheelchair. There are easy ways, but less intelligent and less effective, such as using RFID stickers or QRcode stickers and other methods, and there is a more difficult, but more intelligent and effective method, which is to use ultrasonic sensor and encoder with raspberry pi, so that we take advantage of the ultrasonic sensor to draw a map and take advantage of the encoder sensor to locate the robot and know the distance and speed at which the robot moved, and all this is done through raspberry pi, and thus downloading ROS (Robot Operating System) to raspberry pi to write and execute algorithms (mapping, localization, and path planning,) and link them with the chair.