Robotic wheelchair with autonomous traveling capability for transportation assistance in an urban environment

To realize a new type of personal vehicle for elderly people while contributing to a low-carbon traffic society, we have been developing a robotic wheelchair with autonomous traveling and obstacle avoidance in an urban environment. In this paper, we primarily discuss two kinds of key technologies, long-distance autonomous travel in an outdoor environment and obstacle avoidance in a human-shared environment. For the localization and navigation methods, we propose sub-map dividing and realignment with FastSLAM, which enables generation of large-scale 3D voxel maps by the sampling based SLAM method. For the planning and obstacle avoidance methods, we propose motion control by a combination of the global/local A* algorithm and the dynamic window approach. To confirm the effectiveness of our proposed methods, the results of demonstration experiments using our robotic wheelchair `Marcus´ in the Tsukuba Robot Zone are also reported.