Assisting Control of Electric Wheelchair for Collision Avoidance By Using a Depth Sensor

In a modern aging society, electric wheelchairs are an essential means of transportation for the elderly. In contrast, human operation errors of the electric wheelchair cause some accidents. For a control system operated by a human, human assist control to avoid accidents attracts much attention in recent years. For this problem, Hayashi et al. have proposed a human assist control of the electric wheelchair by using the control barrier function. However, the proposed method had a problem that delays human assist control due to a Laser Range Finder which needs some time to get the distance to obstacles. In this paper, we consider a depth sensor as a novel position measurement sensor. The depth sensor attracts much attention because the depth sensor is cheap and high availability. We evaluate the effectiveness of the depth sensor for human assist control of the electric wheelchair. Finally, we demonstrate the superior performance of the depth sensor by actual experiments, compared with a Laser Range Finder.