Experimental Evaluation of Road-Crossing Decisions by Autonomous Wheelchairs against Environmental Factors

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how environmental factors like fog, rain, and darkness impact the tracking accuracy of autonomous wheelchairs during road crossing, proposing a method to quantify and mitigate these effects for improved safety.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to quantify environmental effects on tracking performance in outdoor scenarios for autonomous wheelchairs, enabling better safety measures.

Findings

Environmental factors negatively affect tracking accuracy.

The proposed method quantifies the impact of weather conditions.

System warnings and reconfiguration can improve safety.

Abstract

Safe road crossing by autonomous wheelchairs can be affected by several environmental factors such as adverse weather conditions influencing the accuracy of artificial vision. Previous studies have addressed experimental evaluation of multi-sensor information fusion to support road-crossing decisions in autonomous wheelchairs. In this study, we focus on the fine-tuning of tracking performance and on its experimental evaluation against outdoor environmental factors such as fog, rain, darkness, etc. It is rather intuitive that those factors can negatively affect the tracking performance; therefore our aim is to provide an approach to quantify their effects in the reference scenario, in order to detect conditions of unacceptable accuracy. In those cases, warnings can be issued and system can be possibly reconfigured to reduce the reputation of less accurate sensors, and thus improve overall safety. Critical situations can be detected by the main sensors or by additional sensors, e.g., light sensors, rain sensors, etc. Results have been achieved by using an available laboratory dataset and by applying appropriate software filters; they show that the approach can be adopted to evaluate video tracking and event detection robustness against outdoor environmental factors in relevant operational scenarios.