Autonomousrobotic wheelchairs playimportant roles todisabled persons orelders. Ingeneral, anautonomous robotic wheelchair includes thetechniques ofobstacle sensing and avoidance, local pathnavigation, andfriendly interactions with users whencompared toconventional powered wheelchairs. Most ofresearches on autonomousrobotic wheelchairs usedthe personal computer asthesupervisory controller since itspowerful computingcapacityand familiarcodingenvironment. Nevertheless, thepersonal computerisnotfeasible tothe wheelchair usersduetoinefficient size, lowerreliability and largerpowerconsumptions. To promotefeasible robotic wheelchair control architecture, theembeddedsystem issurveyed inthis paper. Byusing theembeddedcomputing architecture, the proposed robotic wheelchair controller performs characteristics ofcompact size, better reliability andlowerpowerconsumptions whilethebenefits ofpowerful computing capacity andfamiliar coding environment aremaintained. On theotherhand,this paperalsoimplements thefuzzylogicbasedautonomous navigation functions suchasgoal-seeking, wall-following and obstacle avoidance. Theses fuzzy logic basednavigation functions arefusedtogether tosolvepractical situations oftherobotic wheelchairs. Finally, arealrobotic wheelchair withthree-omni- wheelconfiguration isconstructed basedontheproposed control architecture, andseveral practical experiments arealsodiscussed inthis paper.
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