Development of the wheelchair model autonomous mobile robot DREAM-3

Abstract

In this paper, a developmental procedure of the autonomous mobile robot DREAM-3 is described. The DREAM-3 is a mobile robot typed as an electrically driven wheel chair. The aim to develop DREAM-3 is make it travel in indoor environments such as in hospitals and/or welfare facilities for their practical use and serve to care for old people and physically handicapped person. Such a mobile robot has to provide especially the following properties : (1) safety (2) reliability and robustness. To maintain these properties in the traveling, the authors have proposed an environmental map for DREAM-3. Using sensor information, the robot position with its direction is specialized in the environment map. The traveling can be controlled by both traveling trajectory in the environmental map and in the real traveling environment. As a result, this map plays an important role for determining the robot position accurately and for its stable traveling.