Safety-based Speed Control of a Wheelchair using Robust Adaptive Model Predictive Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust adaptive model predictive control method for electric wheelchair speed regulation that ensures safety constraints are maintained even with external disturbances and uncertainties.

Contribution

It presents a novel safety-based speed control algorithm using set-membership estimation and adaptive MPC for wheelchair systems with disturbances and uncertainties.

Findings

Successfully tracks desired speeds within safety limits

Handles infeasible references by guiding system to nearest safe reference

Validated with high-fidelity speed tracking experiments

Abstract

Electric-powered wheelchair plays an important role in providing accessibility for people with mobility impairment. Ensuring the safety of wheelchair operation in different application scenarios and for diverse users is crucial when the designing controller for tracking tasks. In this work, we propose a safety-based speed tracking control algorithm for wheelchair systems with external disturbances and uncertain parameters at the dynamic level. The set-membership approach is applied to estimate the sets of uncertain parameters online and a designed model predictive control scheme with online model and control parameter adaptation is presented to guarantee safety-related constraints during the tracking process. The proposed controller can drive the wheelchair speed to a desired reference within safety constraints. For the inadmissible reference that violates the constraints, the proposed controller can steer the system to the neighbourhood of the closest admissible reference. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is validated based on the high-fidelity speed tracking results of two tasks that involve feasible and infeasible references.