Qualitative Autonomous Navigation for Wheelchair Robots

1 Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens Zographou Campus, Athens, 157 73, Greece E-mail: [email protected] Abstract. This paper describes a novel qualitative navigation method for indoor environments, implemented on top of a commercial power wheelchair. Our approach is based on qualitative representations of variations in sensor behavior between adjacent regions in space. We use these representations to localize and guide planning and reaction. Off-line, the system accepts as input a topological diagram of the environment and generates a map based on a simple qualitative model of sensor behavior. During execution, the robot controller integrates this map into a reaction module. We have tested this architecture both in simulation and in a real wheelchair. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can safely navigate a real robot in indoor environments.