Intelligent wheelchair controller system for human-robot interactions

Abstract

Robot controllers are crucial when executing high-level algorithms. Sometimes designing these controllers from scratch will be the best solution for building robots. However, the process will consume much time to build all the electronics and other mechanical hardware from scratch. Therefore, for rapid prototyping continuing from the available hardware will help a lot to save time. Additionally, low-level controllers are crucial when it comes to autonomous robot manipulations [1]. The outcomes produced via these embedded systems [2] will directly pass to the actuators to operate robots. Therefore, the accuracy of these controllers will also cost the overall accuracy of the entire system [3]. There are many types of controlling mechanisms to control wheelchairs. The pieces of evidence from the literature give many examples[4-7]. Out of these controlling techniques, controlling via a joystick [8] is the default controlling mechanism for almost all wheelchairs. When designing novel controlling mechanisms, the way of perceiving environmental details and delivering control signals that are produced with the algorithms is very important and crucial. When exploring the literature, it shows that layered architecture is preferred for implementing controller mechanisms[9,10]. However, the possibility of integrating hardware systems on top of available designs are challenging task to achieve. Even though the literature shows many developments for controlling mechanisms, scaling these hardware units to align with the present knowledge expansions on the algorithms is far below the expected level. Therefore, this work proposed a novel layered hardware unit to replace existing joystick-based controllers and integrated software modules with the help of the proposed layered architecture. Moreover, the work suggests injecting the data by replacing the already available joystick controller of the wheelchairs. In the rest of the article, section II will introduce proposed architectures, and section III will showcase the results based on the observations and follow up with the discussion. Section IV will conclude the paper with future directions.