A control system of driver assistance and human following for smart wheelchair

Driver assistance is one of the major tasks on smart wheelchair development. However, human following is also necessary in real application. In this paper, a control system of driver assistance and human following for smart wheelchair is presented. Driver assistance can keep the wheelchair from stairs falling and obstacle collision when the user is driving the wheelchair in complex environments with unknown obstacles. Human following can guarantee the wheelchair to follow the user with a suitable distance when the user wants to walk along by himself. The target occlusion problem caused by obstacle avoidance during human following can also be effectively solved by the use of odometry data. Both the driver assistance and human following are based on shared control strategy. And since the sensor used is ultrasound, instead of LRF, the proposed system is low-cost and can be easily implemented in real applications. The system is developed and tested on JiaoLong smart wheelchair. Experiment results show that the proposed system can improve user's driving ability in driver assistance task and it can control the wheelchair to keep a suitable distance with the target human. And it can effectively handle the target occlusion problem when it has to avoid obstacle in human following task.