Multi-level Control of an Intelligent Wheelchair in a Hospital Environment using a Cyber-Mouse Simulation System

The development of intelligent wheelchairs is a very good solution to assist severely handicapped people who are unable to operate classical electrical wheelchair by themselves in their daily activities. This paper describes the integration of a robotic simulator with our intelligent wheelchair shared control and planning modules. An adapted version of the free Cyber-Mouse robotic simulator was used to simulate the movement of the intelligent wheelchair in a hospital environment. Adaptations of the subsumption architecture, Strips Planning and A* Algorithms were employed and integrated to allow wheelchair intelligent behavior. The experimental results have demonstrated the success of the integration of these algorithms in our simulator allowing very safe motion of the intelligent wheelchair in the simulated hospital environment. Also, the adapted Cyber-Mouse simulator proved its capability and robustness in simulating the hospital environment and wheelchair physic characteristics.