Development of safety system for electric wheelchair with thermography camera

This paper describes the development of a safety system for electric wheelchairs applying a thermography camera, laser range finder, and head mounted display. The combination of thermography camera and laser range finder can detect obstacles and/or humans even in the dark. The main problem the thermography camera is the narrow viewing angle. To overcome this problem, we developed a real-time obstacle tracking system that consists of a thermography camera and laser range finder. The combination of devices achieves robust tracking without the time-consuming complicated image processing required in conventional obstacle tracking. To confirm the validity of the proposed approach, we tested the newly developed system in an actual environment.