Inter University Innovations Championship 2013

Automated Guided Wheelchair by Yasith Lokuge, Prashan Madumal, Tharindu Kumara & N. Ranasinghe was placed 1st Runners-up at Inter University Innovations Championship 2013 held on 21st February 2014 at the UCSC.

The Indoor Navigation Framework proposed allows any wheelchair user to be guided to a desired location inside a building, if building floors have UV markers on main corridors. This solution facilitates the owner of the least sophisticated wheelchair to move inside buildings without any assistance. This project is a working prototype which fuifills basic functions of the system. It can be further customized to the needs of the wheelchair user.

Initially, a scaled map of the premises will be fed to the central monitoring computer. This is also fed to the onboard control computer of the wheelchair which is a low cost Rasberry Pi. When we know the initial position, real time location of the wheelchair can be detected through the two encoders of the wheels and the digital compass fixed to the wheelchair. When the user needs to go to a specific location, he/she only needs to enter that location through onboard computer GUI. Then the central computer will calculate the best possible path to the said location and transfer the calculated data to the onboard computer. The wheelchair will be navigated by the on board computer. The solution also include a method to avoid unforeseen obstacles on the path.

This work has been published at the Intelligent Systems Modelling and Simulations (ISMS) Conference held at Lankawi, Malaysia, 27-29 January 2014 under the title “Indoor Navigation Framework for Mapping and Localization of Multiple Robotic Wheelchairs”.