2021 Volume 39 Issue 2 Pages 159-168
This paper proposes a mobile robot system which realizes mobility assistance with a manual wheelchair when a handcar chair user needs moving assistance. The mobility assistance is triggered by recognizing wheelchair user's demand by using visual sensor. We suggest a task consisting of three phases for realizing automatic connection of a wheelchair by a robot. The first phase is a proposal and verification of a method to estimate the actual position and orientation of a wheelchair from the depth information of the Kinect v2 sensor. The second phase is the implementation of the path planning of the robot using the estimated position and orientation of the wheelchair as the target value coordinates and its running control mode. The third phase is a mode in which the robot connects to the wheelchair hand unit from behind the wheelchair, and is integrated with the wheelchair as it is in the steering mode and autonomous driving mode. The effectiveness of automatic wheelchair connection system that integrates the tasks of each phase is verified by actual traveling experiments.
