Navigating a Robotic Wheelchair in a Railway Station during Rush Hour

Abstract

This paper describes the hardware design, control, and navigation system of and some preliminary experiments with the robotic wheelchair Mobility Aid for elderly and disabled people (MAid). MAid's general task is to transport people with severely impaired motion skills. The authors did not set out to reinvent and redevelop the set of standard skills of so-called intelligent wheelchairs, such as FollowWall, FollowCorridor, PassDoorway, which are commonly described in the literature. These maneuvers require motion control skills that disabled people, in spite of their disabilities, are eager to learn and quite good at using. Instead, this work focused on generalizing the approach to fine motion control by considering those maneuvers identified as very burdensome due to their duration and required concentration. One of these functions is deliberative locomotion in rapidly changing, large-scale environments, such as shopping malls, entry halls of theaters, and concourses of airports or railway stations, where tens or hundreds of people and objects move around. MAid's performance was tested in the central station of Ulm during rush hour and in the exhibition halls of the Hannover Messe '98, the largest industrial fair in the world. Altogether, MAid has survived more than 36 h of testing in public, crowded environments with heavy passenger traffic.

A new multi-criteria optimization strategy for shared control in wheelchair assisted navigation

“…Furthermore, lack of human resources to assist elder people leads naturally to create systems to do it in an autonomous way (e.g. Prassler et al 1999;Volosyak et al 2005).…”

The Hybrid Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle

“…Velocity obstacles have been used in practice for applications such as warning drivers of impending highway collisions [15], navigating a robotic wheelchair through a crowded station [16], directing an autonomous robot within a pharmaceuticals plant [17], and mission planning for an unmanned aerial vehicle [18].…”

“…The velocity obstacle has been successfully used to navigate one robot through an environment containing multiple dynamic obstacles by having the robot select a velocity in each time step that is outside any of the velocity obstacles induced by the dynamic obstacles [2], [16], [21]. Unfortunately, the velocity obstacle concept does not work well for navigating multiple robots where each robot is actively adapting its velocity to avoid the other robots since it assumes that other robots never change their velocities [19].…”

Online Localization and Mapping with Moving Object Tracking in Dynamic Outdoor Environments

“…Recently, there are considerable research efforts focusing on these problems [12], [7], [16], [17]. However, for highly dynamic outdoor environments like crowded urban streets, there still remains many open questions.…”