Basic Design of Visual Saliency Based Autopilot System Used for Omnidirectional Mobile Electric Wheelchair

摘要

This paper presents a fundamental design of an autopilot system to actualize automatic locomotion for an electric wheelchair with emphasis on simplicity and functionality. For this study, we designed a novel electric wheelchair with advanced mobility using Mecanum wheels that actualize omnidirectional movements without turning and developed a prototype with consideration devoted to the exterior design. Moreover, our developed prototype is considered with devotion of the exterior design. Our design concept is Electric Personal Assistive Mobility Device (EPAMD), which has ease of integration with a person's daily life. To prevent collisions, ranging sensors and depth sensors are used for environmental recognition. This paper presents global locomotion and local locomotion as frame- works for an autopilot. For global locomotion, we address algorithms of visual landmark detection based on visual saliency and the creation of category maps based on adaptive and unsupervised machine learning. Our method visualizes time-series features and their relations on visual landmarks in a low-dimensional space. We examine a novel design and its possible adaptation to an electric wheelchair as an EPAMD, especially intended to improve the independence of elderly people in their daily life.