Development of a Lightweight, Low-cost, Self-balancing Personal Mobility Vehicle for Autonomous Indoor Navigation

Travelling along routine paths on foot is an exhausting and mundane task. Current personal mobility vehicles (PMVs), which address this issue, are driven manually and are too heavy to be carried by the user when needed. As a solution to this, an autonomous, self-balancing, lightweight, compact and low-cost PMV is developed. The device is capable of simultaneously self-balancing and navigating autonomously in an indoor environment. Moreover, it can be manually controlled using the developed smart mobile phone application. Self-balancing, localization, navigation and obstacle avoidance are achieved in real time using on-board sensors and processing units. Systematic experiments are carried out with the developed PMV in typical indoor environments in order to assess the robustness of the above features. The results show that the robot is able to successfully achieve its navigation tasks both with and without a human passenger. In addition, feedback obtained from the general public during a 3-day exhibition shows the public acceptance of the vehicle.