Smart Powered Wheelchair Platform Design and control for People with Severe Disabilities

Development of new systems for disabled and elderly people’s assistance requires a multidisciplinary approach based on new technologies according to users’ needs. Intelligent wheelchairs can help this category of people to live more independently. The purpose of this paper is to propose and develop embedded control architecture for smart wheelchair monitoring, leading to gain mobility and independency. The control architecture uses virtual impedance principle and is based on some considerations concerning external force-feedback joystick abilities to translate variations of distances between the wheelchair and obstacles into a perceived effort. To test the effectiveness and evaluate performances of the proposed control architecture, some simulations and experimentations on a smart wheelchair called LIASD-WheelChair, are designed in this respect.