Autonomous wheelchair is an essential assistive technology that can accommodate a segment of disabled individuals who cannot operate manual or electric-powered wheelchairs. This technology is necessary for our client with severe spasms, currently controlling his computer (and world) through an eye-tracker. A previous iteration of this project involved using eye-controlled input to steer the wheelchair. This setup was limited to just using an eye-tracker for control and did not have other operating modes (e.g., fully autonomous navigation, line following etc.)
The goal of this project is to create a modular robotic control software architecture that is independent of the specific bus architecture of the underlying hardware of an electric power wheelchair. This decoupling will allow the software to run on different electric power wheelchairs without needing major changes to the software itself. The software can easily be expanded to include various control or navigation algorithms to implement multiple operating modes and connect to multi-modal interfaces. This will allow users to adjust the level of 'assistance'.
This project is funded by Ability Tech (Lab). See for information about the team and project at http://abilitytech.nl