Location and high level planning for a powered wheelchair

The VAHM project aims to improve the control of powered wheelchairs allowing access to local primitives like "wall following" or "obstacles avoiding" and to possibilities of automatically generated trajectories. Mobility task planning implies environment modelling. So, several complementary models are present in the system. A topological model of free spaces allows trajectory calculation taking into account the non-holonomic constraints. A geometrical model composed of line segments is used for the robot location by snatching the ultrasonic and odometric datas with the environment. Finally a semantical model makes the man-machine communication more natural and may bring some reasoning capacities to the machine as well as navigation assistance for people with cognitive impairment.<
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