Comparison of Electric Wheelchair Control Systems in a Virtual Environment

Development of control systems for electric wheelchair has been an active area of research since the 1990's and yet few sophisticated control systems have been deployed for general use in the wheelchair user population. Evidence of comparisons of wheelchair control systems in the literature are limited and few examples exist that indicates how specific control systems may benefit users with specific symptoms rather than underlying medical conditions. This paper provides an overview of a simple virtual environment that may be used to compare various wheelchair control systems. Elements of each control system are separated into layers which not only allow the comparison of control systems detailed in the literature but also allow the recombination of the layers into new control systems. A comparison of two control systems with differing levels of complexity is described here. While the virtual environment described does not yet have all features fully implemented the initial results from the comparison of the two control systems does indicate that the virtual environment produces results analogous to those derived from real world testing.