Comparative study on different adaptation approaches concerning a sip and puff controller for a powered wheelchair

Advance technologies are used to overcome a wide range of deficiencies for driving a powered wheelchair. Tetraplegia is one of the cases where complex and expensive interfaces are used for this issue. One interesting solution for this kind of deficiency consists of using a sip and puff interface. It is a simple and inexpensive method but it has two important limitations that restrict its practical use. The first one is in the reduced degree of freedom. The second one is in the tiring driving process. In order to minimize the driving effort for a given trajectory or for an unknown trajectory, this paper presents an optimal adaptation of the controller parameters. The adaptation could be done statically or dynamically according to the environment requirements. The controller is validated by means of simulations applied to three different cases: 1- the complete pathway is defined, 2- the pathway is divided to sub-paths and 3- the pathway is unknown. The first two cases are processed by means of averaging the pathway parameters and the third one by using a fuzzy controller.