A Driving Assistance for a Powerd Wheelchair on a Pedestrian Flows

This paper propose a driving assistance scheme for a powered wheelchair with a force feedback function of its joystick. Generally, a powered wheelchair moves in a human coexistence environment such as a pedestrian way and it is important to move on these environments without a feeling of oppression to other people around it. Therefore, we propose a concept of a dynamic personal space which is a region surrounding a person who can feel comfortable psychologically to other person with a moving wheelchair in the pedestrian flows. A dynamic personal space is defined considering with a relative velocity and acceleration between the powered wheelchair and the pedestrians around it. Using this concept, we develop a driving assistance system using a force feedback of its joystick, which enables the powered wheelchair to move in a human coexistence environment without a feeling of oppression on other people. In this paper, we investigate spatial relationship with a powered wheelchair experimentally and define a dynamic personal space using these results. For verifying its effectiveness, the performance of our system is verified by experiments using our prototype.