The development of the automatic lane following navigation system for the intelligent robotic wheelchair

In this paper, we constructed an intelligent robotic wheelchair equipped with automatic tracking function in barrier-free environment of campus; the system used video paint line detection as the basis of automatic tracking navigation; since the barrier-free environment of campus includes indoor and outdoor environment and the outdoor environment includes gentle slopes, sidewalk and etc, we proposed a paint line detection method, which showed color distribution and judgment of paint line using Gaussian mixture models; the input image completed paint line detection and parameters calculation with this method and then input them into the fuzzy logic controller of wheelchair and in this way, the tracking navigation control of wheelchair was performed; the system was actually tested on barrier-free paths in campus, including straight and curve barrier-free paths; the result showed that the system could make the wheelchair keep moving on the paint line correctly and the mean deviation was kept within ±10 cm, which proved the navigation of intelligent robotic wheelchair could be realized automatically and successfully on barrier-free paths in campus.