High performance control for graceful motion of an intelligent wheelchair

— To be acceptable to human drivers, the motion of an intelligent robotic wheelchair must be more than just collision-free: it must be graceful. We define graceful motion as being safe, comfortable, fast and intuitive. In this paper, we quantify these properties of graceful motion, providing formal evaluation criteria. We propose a method for graceful motion and present implementation results for the task of driving through a narrow doorway, evaluated on a simulated model of the wheelchair. We use B-splines to specify an intuitive path to a goal, and then describe path-following control law for a differentialdrive wheeled vehicle to follow that path within velocity and acceleration bounds. Existing methods typically respond to tight clearances with very slow motion which is not graceful. Our results show that, starting from a set of representative poses, the wheelchair passes through the door at near maximum speed, staying close to the mid-line of the doorway. The velocity of the wh...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Shilpa Gulati, Benjamin Kuipers
• Keywords: Formal Evaluation Criteria, Graceful Motion, ICRA 2008, Robotics, Slow Motion