System design consideration for digital wheelchair controller

The design and implementation of a digital wheelchair controller system is presented in this paper. This novel model depicts an information flow between the driving commands and wheel speed. A command interpreter and two speed processing datapaths are proposed as functionally independent blocks for the controller. The control process consists of the following steps: command decoding, speed estimation, and speed serving. Through proper partitioning to concurrent blocks, the design complexity is reduced significantly. Block reconfiguration for field-programmable gate array rapid prototyping is also employed in this paper, and system fidelity and development efficiency are revealed through the experimental results.