Hybrid navigation decision control mechanism for intelligent wheel-chair

Abstract

he continuous rising of the elderly/disabled population has created a requirement for assistiverobotics devices to counter the lack of trustworthy servants. Intelligent Wheelchairs are developed forthat particular purpose. Intelligent Wheelchairs differ depending on the interactive modality and mostcommonly found modalities are speech-controlled. Since these are assistive devices that need to act as humancompanions, it is necessary to have a dialogue between the device and the user. Even though the wheelchair isfully automated, the user should have control over it at some point. However, this exchange of control shouldbe intelligent and transitions need to be executed in order to safeguard the user. Therefore the purpose ofthis paper is to propose an intelligent system that would navigate an intelligent voice-controlled wheelchairfacilitating the intelligent exchange of control between the user and the wheelchair. This control is notsimultaneous and one can override the other only when navigation could lead to collisions. In the proposedmethod, users can control the wheelchair using fixed vocal commands, and execution of those commandswill be performed using the spatial and control parameters. Control of the wheelchair will be exchangedbetween the user and the wheelchair itself considering specific parameters such as obstacle distance, collisiontime, the velocity of the wheelchair among others. User control mode has 5 definite vocal commands withclassifiers to identify any navigation command into the command model and considers uncertain terms suchas ‘little’ and ‘hard’ for ‘Turn’ commands. Command classification had produced a Cohen’s Kappa value of0.9462 and the classifier for the uncertain terms had produced a Cohen’s Kappa value of 0.7325. Both wereacceptable values for those particular classifications. As per the experiment results, the proposed systemreduced the vocal command frequency and risk of collisions through proper control of the velocity levelsand intelligent exchange of control at given locations.

(1) (PDF) Hybrid Navigation Decision Control Mechanism for Intelligent Wheel-Chair. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374131541_Hybrid_Navigation_Decision_Control_Mechanism_for_Intelligent_Wheel-Chair [accessed Nov 30 2023].