Development of a navigation system for semi-autonomous operation of wheelchairs

This paper outlines the development of a navigation system to give semi-autonomous operation of wheelchairs. Our goal is to develop a navigation system that is commercially viable and capable of being retro-fitted to powered electric wheelchairs in the near future. We introduce our proposed system, and discuss the three crucial components of any autonomous/semi-autonomous system: SLAM, obstacle avoidance, and path planning. Our system makes extensive use of freely available open-source software. Using The Player Project as the base framework, we use GMapping for mapping, Vector Field Histograms for obstacle avoidance, and Wavefront for path planning. Qualitative results are provided and discussed.