Identification of directional intention for a wheelchair robot using a distance fuzzy reasoning algorithm

To keep and ease daily activities for the people with walking disability, a wheelchair robot has been developed in the authors´ lab. A joystick was designed for the user to manipulate the motion of robot. However, it is not convenient for the user to manipulate the joystick and conduct the daily activity concurrently. Therefore, in this paper, a novel method which can recognize the user´s directional intention is proposed based on a distance-type fuzzy reasoning method. Firstly the fuzzy knowledge base is collected by experiments based on the fact that directional intention of the user has the relevance with the seating pressure distribution exerted to the seat of the robot. Then, the fuzzy if-then rules are constructed based on the collected fuzzy knowledge, and a distance-type fuzzy reasoning method is proposed to identify the directional intention of user using current seating pressures. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by experiments.