Gesture controlled wheel chair using IR-LED TSOP pairs along with collision avoidance

In this era of fast growing Medical and Health facilities, there are still a large number of people who are finding it difficult for day to day locomotion. Evidently a Wheel chair is the best option that will help them to a great extent. Our goal is to help physically disabled people who are impaired with diseases which affect their day to day navigation. Driving a wheelchair in domestic environments is a difficult task even for a normal person and becomes even more difficult for people with arms or hands impairments. The use of powered wheelchairs with high navigational intelligence is one of the great steps towards the integration of severely physically disabled and mentally handicapped people. We propose a system that will solve the difficulties faced by these individuals using an innovative navigation system. The powered wheel chair is a great technological achievement which may prove to be a boon in the lives of physically challenged and mentally handicapped people. Although there are existing technologies, people experience significant difficulties for their day to day locomotion. None of them served to be customizable, economical and user friendly all at the same time. So with this problem of concern, we developed an electrically powered wheel chair that is customizable, economical and at the same time user friendly. The proposed system uses IR-LED - TSOP pair of sensors arranged in a specific pattern that are used to sense the gesture. The control signals generated are fed to the microcontroller which will drive the motors of the wheelchair. This systematic arrangement detects the hand gestures made by the user and interprets the direction of movement of the wheelchair and moves accordingly. The whole arrangement provides an effortless, convenient, quick and smooth navigation experiences. The hard ware implementation of this projected wheel chair consists of wheel chair, an ATmega microcontroller, Ultrasonic Sensor, Hercules power driver system and finally the gesture recognition module made up of IR-LEDTSOP pair technology. We have also calculated the response of the system under various conditions which is detailed in the paper.