Development of a Modular Real-time Shared-control System for a Smart Wheelchair

TL;DR

This paper presents a modular, cost-effective real-time shared-control system for powered wheelchairs, enhancing autonomous mobility for disabled users through visual SLAM and obstacle avoidance using a stereo camera.

Contribution

The work introduces a modular system that integrates visual SLAM and path planning on a standard wheelchair without major hardware modifications, using open-source ROS packages.

Findings

Effective in simulation and real-world tests

Enables autonomous navigation with a single stereo camera

Maintains a compact form factor

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a modular navigation system that can be mounted on a regular powered wheelchair to assist disabled children and the elderly with autonomous mobility and shared-control features. The lack of independent mobility drastically affects an individual's mental and physical health making them feel less self-reliant, especially children with Cerebral Palsy and limited cognitive skills. To address this problem, we propose a comparatively inexpensive and modular system that uses a stereo camera to perform tasks such as path planning, obstacle avoidance, and collision detection in environments with narrow corridors. We avoid any major changes to the hardware of the wheelchair for an easy installation by replacing wheel encoders with a stereo camera for visual odometry. An open source software package, the Real-Time Appearance Based Mapping package, running on top of the Robot Operating System (ROS) allows us to perform visual SLAM that allows mapping and localizing itself in the environment. The path planning is performed by the move base package provided by ROS, which quickly and efficiently computes the path trajectory for the wheelchair. In this work, we present the design and development of the system along with its significant functionalities. Further, we report experimental results from a Gazebo simulation and real-world scenarios to prove the effectiveness of our proposed system with a compact form factor and a single stereo camera.