ROS-Based Digital Twin for Power Wheelchair

It is notorious these days that there are several limitations for wheelchair users, namely the accessibility in public spaces, the financial capacity to acquire a model that is suitable for their needs, and the lack of knowledge regarding the wheelchair's components. With millions of users around the world, and a high percentage of them reporting at least one accident in the last three years of use, it becomes necessary to find a viable solution for all of these problems. In order to tackle them, a Digital Twin of a power wheelchair was developed, whose purpose is to monitor and store the state of its components and replicate its movements, using a virtual model. Instead of a real power wheelchair, an identical prototype was created based on the LEGO EV3 module integrated with a CMPS11 compass module. The virtual entity itself was developed in the Robot Operating System (ROS) environment, using the Gazebo simulator for visualization of the 3D model, which was created using Blender, a 3D computer graphics tool. To monitor the wheelchair's tilt variations and component status, a dashboard interface was developed using Node-RED, containing several graphs, alarm features and an option to store the generated data in a CSV file.