Coordinating navigation of multi-wheelchairs in indoor environments with wireless visual sensor network

Currently, combining the technology of robot control with wireless sensor network to serve for human being is a hot topic. Coordinating the navigation of multi-robots or multi-wheelchairs under the indoor environments is a challenging task, not only because of the environment limitations, but also because of many dynamic objects. In this paper, firstly, a kind of wireless visual sensor network (WVSN) embedded in the indoor environments is built to coordinate the navigation of multiple wheelchairs. Next, a four-phase navigation routing algorithm is presented. Combinations of multiple protocols in different phases is tested and discussed under a simulation environment. Finally, a prototype is implemented to verify the effectiveness of a selected routing algorithm in a real world scenario.