Automatic guided intelligent wheelchair system using hierarchical grey-fuzzy motion decision-making algorithms

The development of intelligent wheelchairs can bring a good solution to assist severely handicapped people who are unable to operate the classical electrical wheelchair by themselves in their daily activities. In this paper we have developed a new concept on automatic guided intelligent wheelchair system, through which the wheelchair users can extend their activity area from a priori known environment as many autonomous approaches addressed. We describe a hierarchical look-ahead grey-fuzzy decision motion algorithm for the tracking control of the wheelchair to follow a guiding service robot in an unknown environment. We have developed a multisensor based intelligent wheelchair prototype called "Luoson III" to work with the previous built autonomous guiding service robot "Chung-Cheng 1". The experimental results have demonstrated the success for the motion decision algorithm and the whole concept.