Design and Implementation of a Smart Wheelchair

Amit Ranjan Trivedi, Abhash Kumar Swagat Kumar

Singh, Sundara Tejaswi Digumarti and Innovation Labs
Deepak Fulwani Tata Consultancy Services
Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur New Delhi, India 201301
Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India 342011 swagat.kumar@tcs.com
(amitrt,abhash,tejaswi,df)@iitj.ac.in

ABSTRACT and educational opportunities, reduces dependence on care-

A smart wheelchair can restore autonomy to patients with givers and promotes feeling of self-reliance [22, 24]. Powered
sensori-motor disabilities by enabling them to move around wheelchairs are preferred over the manual wheelchairs which
freely without depending on the care givers. The objective of are physically demanding. Powered wheelchairs make use of
a smart wheelchair is to reduce user effort in controlling the electric motors which run on batteries. The wheelchairs are
wheelchair and to ensure safety during movement. In this usually controlled through a joystick. However, using a joy-
paper, our focus is to design and develop a smart wheelchair stick might not be possible for many patients who might
using inexpensive hardware and open-source software so as have sensori-motor or cognitive impairments [22]. For in-
to make it affordable to a larger section of the target popu- stance, about 10-40 percent of patients in United States
lation, particularly in developing nations. The user can con- who desired powered mobility could not be fitted with pow-
trol the wheelchair using three interfaces namely, keyboard, ered wheelchair because of sensory impairments, poor motor
a webcam and a microphone. Webcam is used to detect function or cognitive deficits [24].
head-tilt which can be used for turning the wheelchair. Mi- According to an estimate by United Nations [5], around
crophone is used for controlling the wheelchair through dis- 10% of the world’s population, or 650 million people, live
crete voice commands. The wheelchair can be operated in with disability. Eighty percent of this population live in
three modes namely, manual, automatic and tele-operation developing countries. According to US Census Bureau [2],
modes. The software and hardware architecture of the plat- there are approximately 56.7 million people living in United
form is described in detail and experiments are performed States had some kind of disability in 2010 and this accounts
to demonstrate the usability of the platform. for 18.7% of the US population. About 12.3 million people
aged 6 years and older needed assistance with one or more
activities of daily living (ADL). In India, disability consti-
Categories and Subject Descriptors tutes approximately 5% [5] (2% in 2001 [3]) of the population
B.1 [Control structures and microprogramming]: Hard- out of which at least 8% have locomotion related disabili-
ware; J.3 [Life and Medical Sciences]: Health ties. A significant proportion of this population would be
benefited from a smart wheelchair to help them with their
activities of daily living (ADL). With unprecedented rate of
General Terms ageing all over the world approximately 2 billion people will
Design,Experimentation be aged 60 and older by 2050 [4, 30]. This indicates that
the demand for some form of assistive mobility will increase
Keywords over next few decades. In [24], Simpson attempts to charac-
terize and quantify the need for smart wheelchairs. It lists
Smart wheelchair, voice control, gesture-based control out various categories of population who might benefit from
the use of smart wheelchair. It carries out a detail study
1. INTRODUCTION of various trends and projects a growing market for smart
The overall objective of this project is to restore autonomy wheelchairs across the globe.
to disabled people by helping them use a powered wheelchair A smart wheelchair consists of a standard powered wheelchair
independently. Independent mobility is recognized as an im- with an on-board computer and a collection of sensors [24,
portant factor necessary for socio-cognitive development of 25]. A smart wheelchair usually implements a shared control
an individual. Independent mobility increases vocational architecture [12, 18, 25] where the control of the wheelchair
is shared with the user while minimizing the human effort
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for in carrying out various tasks like target acquisition, navi-
Permission
personal or to make digital
classroom use isor hard copies
granted withoutoffee
allprovided
or part ofthatthis workare
copies for
personal gation, path planning, localization and obstacle avoidance
not madeororclassroom
distributedusefor isprofit
granted without feeadvantage
or commercial provided and
that that
copies are
etc. Readers can refer to [22] for a review on various ad-
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to vancements carried out in this area. Recently, the focus
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republish, to postofonthis workorowned
servers by otherstothan
to redistribute lists,ACM mustprior
requires be specific
honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or
of research is towards developing intuitive Human-machine
permission and/or a fee. interface (HMI) that would minimize the human effort in
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Permission@acm.org . requires prior
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interacting with the wheelchair. Some of the approaches
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978-1-4503-2347-5/13/07 are as follows. Some researchers used a vision-based inter-
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 With camera
Laptop
and Microphone

Support for
Lap-tray

Array of
Sonar Sensors
Electrical
Motors
Figure 1. Wheelchair platform used for this project
Motor Control
Circuit
face where a virtual interface is projected on to a laptray
which is monitored by an overhead camera [18, 20]. Simp-
son et al. [23, 25] demonstrated the use of voice control of Figure 2. Main components of a smart wheelchair
wheelchair. Yanco [31] used eye-tracking or EOG signal for system
controlling the wheelchair in 1998. Mazo [13, 14] developed
an integrated human machine interface (HMI) that incor-
porated several types of user inputs like, breath-expulsion, Table 1. Approximate Cost for Smart Wheelchair
head movement, eye-tracking, face tracking for controlling S. No. Components Approximate Cost (USD)
the wheelchair. Min et al. [8] use force sensors to measure
shoulder and head movement which, in-turn, are used for 1 Powered Wheelchair 1200
controlling a wheelchair. Law et al. [11] developed a cap 2 Laptop with built-in 400
interface to control a wheelchair using EOG signal from webcam and micro-
eye-gaze movement and EMG signal from jaw-movement. phone
Another EMG based control wheelchair control system was
demonstrated by Felzer et al. [6] where muscle contractions 3 Sonar Sensors 200
are translated into appropriate motion commands. Quite
4 Another webcam for 30
recently, researchers have started using brain signals (EEG)
visual navigation
to control wheelchair [21, 27].
In this paper, we describe the design and development of a 5 Motor drivers and 170
smart wheelchair with a focus on minimizing the sensor and other accessories
computational requirement thereby making it affordable to
larger section of the population residing in developing coun- Total Cost 2000
tries. We avoid the use of expensive sensors like Laser, motor
encoders, gyros, accelerometers etc. and instead use ultra-
sonic sensors and webcam for navigation and path planning. structures are built in order to house sonar array and hold
The user inputs are interpreted either using a webcam or laptop. The modified structure is shown in Figure 1. The
through speech recognition, rather than using EOG, EMG wheelchair is driven by a 200 watt motor capable of carrying
or EEG signals which require sophisticated acquisition hard- a load of approximately 100 Kgs at a maximum speed of 5
ware. Our aim is to use better algorithms and software to kmph. The power supply is obtained from a 24V, 17Ah bat-
compensate for the absence of sophisticated sensors. We be- tery bank. The original system consists of a joystick which
lieve that a smart wheelchair with a set of features currently can be used for controlling the wheelchair. The wheelchair is
available with many of the existing platforms could be pro- available at a cost of approximately INR 60,000 (USD 1200)
vided at a cost of USD 2000. While lower cost will make in India. The smart wheelchair prototype is shown in Figure
this platform affordable to larger section of population in 2. It consists of the following major physical components:
developing countries, the proposed design could bring down (1) A electric wheelchair powered by battery, (2) a laptop
the overall healthcare cost also for the patients in developed with a built-in webcam and microphone, (3) motor-driver
countries who use smart wheelchair for their daily activities. system and (4) an array of sonar sensors. The approximate
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The hard- cost of our project is about USD 2000 with break-up cost as
ware and software details of the wheelchair platform is pro- shown in Table 1.
vided in the next section. The algorithms used for develop-
ing user interfaces based on speech and vision is explained
2.2 Two-stage Control Architecture
in Section 3. The future scope of the work is provided in The schematic of a two-stage control architecture [14, 31]
Section 4 followed by conclusion in Section 5. used for our system is shown in Figure 3. At a lower level,
an Arduino Mega [1] based micro-controller system is used
to control the motor and to read the values from the sonar
2. DESCRIPTION OF THE WHEELCHAIR array. Arduino Mega has 54 digital I/O pins out of which
PLATFORM 14 can be used as PWM pins, 16 analog inputs, 4 UARTs,
a 16MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection and a reset
2.1 The Wheelchair System button. The PWM pins are used for controlling the motor
The platform consists of an electric wheelchair obtained through a Super Hercules 9V-24V, 15A motor driver [15].
from Ostrich Mobility in India [17]. Additional support Controlling of motor require 3 pins, one for direction and

two for speed. Speed is controlled by varying the PWM.
The sonar values are read through the analog input pins and
the micro-controller board communicates with the laptop
through a USB cable.
At a higher-level, we have a laptop running on GNU/Linux
operating system (Ubuntu) which is used for implement-
ing various complex algorithms like speech recognition or
image processing, obstacle avoidance, navigation, mapping
etc. While the low-level system is used for data acquisition
(input/output), the decision making is carried out by the
high-level system.
Since our objective was to control the wheelchair through
a computer, we decided to get rid of the original joystick
controller that came with the wheelchair. This is unlike the
previous approaches by Simpson [25] [12], where the joystick
is an integral part of the shared-control architecture. The
joystick functionality is now provided through the laptop
keyboard if a manual operation is desired.
2.3 User Interface
The user can interact with the wheelchair through three
interfaces: (1) Keyboard, (2) webcam and (3) microphone.
All these three interfaces are available on the laptop. Key-
board is the replacement for the joystick which can be used
for maneuvering the wheelchair. The built-in webcam is
used for measuring the head-tilt of a person. In general, the
robot is supposed to move in a straight line once started.
The wheelchair turns left or right by detecting the head-tilt
through image processing. The process will be explained
later in the simulation section. Microphone is used for con-
trolling the wheelchair through discrete voice commands.
Specific words are mapped into different kinds of motion
including ’halt’. The later two interfaces are meant for pa-
tients with sensori-motor disabilities who can not operate
through keyboard.
In order to keep the total cost low, we deliberately avoid
using other interfaces, for instance, virtual interface that
requires additional projector and overhead camera system
[20] [18] or EMG or EEG based interface systems [8] [11] [21].
We believe that by using better algorithms, it is possible
to provide effective interface for a user to interact with the
wheelchair and in this paper, we demonstrate the working
of speech and vision-based interfaces.
2.4 Modes of Operation
Three control modes are available for our platform: man-
ual, automatic and tele-operation. In manual mode, the
operator uses one of the above three interfaces to give com-
mand to the wheelchair. The commands are translated into
the corresponding motor velocities by the micro-controller
board. In this mode, the user is responsible for guiding the
wheelchair at all times.
In automatic mode, the goal is set by the operator and
the operation is carried out the wheelchair without any fur-
ther intervention from the user. For instance, the user can
select a particular location visible on the screen and the
robot would navigate through the environment to reach the
destination. The goal can also be provided using voice com-
mands. For instance, “Go Home” would tell the wheelchair
to take the user to its pre-defined home location. Similarly,
a word “Explore” would tell robot to build a map of the envi-
ronment while moving. During all autonomous operations,
the obstacle is avoided using sonar readings.
Serial Communication
Laptop Running 24V, 200W Motors
on Ubuntu
Via USB Cable
PWM Output
Arduino Mega
Super Hercules
Micro-controller
Board 9V-24V, 15A
Motor Driver
Analog Input
Array of Sonar
Sensors
Figure 3. A Two-stage control architecture used
for controlling the wheelchair system. The low-level
micro-controller system is used for data acquisition
(input/output) and the high-level system is used for
decision making.
In tele-operation mode, the wheelchair is controller re-
motely over a wireless LAN connection by an operator. The
operator gets the live feedback about the path from a cam-
era mounted on the wheelchair. The patient sitting on the
wheelchair can still communicate with the operator through
microphone. More details about this mode is provided in
the next section.
2.5 Implementation: System Architecture
The architecture of the system is shown in Figure 4. The
bottom-most (first) layer is the hardware which includes the
physical components of the wheelchair including sensors and
actuators (motors). The second-layer consists of software
necessary for interfacing with the hardware. These are the
routines which are implemented on a micro-controller nec-
essary for controlling the motors or reading from the sonars.
The pseudo-code of routines running on Arduino board is
shown in the Table 1. Within every loop, it reads the sen-
sor values sends them to laptop for processing, reads the
decision from the serial port and then controls the motor
motion. Any other low level function can be put into this
loop.
The third layer constitutes the Control Layer where the
higher-level decisions are taken. It reads data from the lower
layer or from few high-level sensors like camera. Decision
algorithms are implemented after processing the inputs ob-
tained from these sensors. This layer can send out the de-
cision commands to the lower layer. The programs for this
layer are executed on the laptop which has more computa-
tional power compared to the micro-controller board used
in the lower layer. One example of a high-level task that is
performed in this layer is obstacle avoidance for which the
pseudocode is provided in Table 2. As one can see, the sen-
sor readings obtained from the hardware layer is processed
and motion commands are generated by this program and
sent back to the hardware layer for execution.
The last and upper-most layer is the User Interface Layer
through which the user can interact with the wheelchair.
The algorithms for interpreting user inputs are also per-
formed on the laptop in our case.

Figure 4. System Architecture: Design Pyramid
Algorithm 1 Pseudocode of routines running on Arduino
1: while TRUE do
2: Read Input from Sensors.
3: Write sensor values to the serial port.
4: Read action values from Serial Port.
5: Control the motors as per action values.
6: end while
Algorithm 2 Pseudocode for avoiding obstacle
1: while TRUE do
2: Read sensor values from serial port.
3: Remove noise from the sensor values.
4: Group sensor readings into three labels: Ls , Rs , Fs
5: Define threshold for obstacle detection for these
groups: Lth , Rth , Fth
6: Set the corresponding motion flags if they exceed
thresholds (Lm , Rm , Fm ).
7: Decide motion command based on the state of the
motion flags.
8: Send the motion command to the serial port for exe-
cution.
9: end while
3. ALGORITHMS FOR HUMAN ROBOT IN-
TERACTION
As stated earlier, our emphasis is on using simple sensors
like a webcam and a microphone to control the wheelchair.
We avoid using other sophisticated methods like eye-tracking
[31] [14] or using brain signals (EEG) [21] [27] or measuring
muscle signals (EMG) [11] [6] for user interaction. These
methods may increase the cost of the wheelchair by a big
margin making it unaffordable to our targeted group. Sec-
ondly, most of these equipments require wearing the sensor
on the body itself which might cause discomfort to the user.
3.1 User-input through a webcam
In this work, we use a webcam to detect the head-tilt of
the operator. This information is used to turn the wheelchair
either to left or right. Contour-detection is used to find the
outline of the head above the shoulder. The location of the
centroid of this outline is then computed. The centroid of
this contour shifts left or right with the head movement.
A standard face detection algorithm could also be used for
detecting the head and then computing the centroid. We
tried using Viola-Jones face detection algorithm [28] based
on Haar classifier for our purpose. However, we found it
quite slow and many a times, it failed to detect the face.
In this respect, the contour detection is found to be more
robust in detecting the head outline as shown in Figure 5.
In order to compute the centroid of the head outline, it is
important to remove the background objects. Colour-based
background subtraction can not be used as the background
becomes non-static as the wheelchair moves. One simple
solution is to subtract two consecutive images to get rid of
the non-changing features of the image.
Figure 5. Detecting head-tilt using contour detec-
tion.
3.2 Controlling the wheelchair using voice com-
mands
Speech recognition refers to comparing a said command to
a predefined library of words and identifying the said word.
We have explored quite a few software packages related to
speech recognition during the development of our project.
We initially implemented a toolkit called âĂIJSphinxkeysâĂİ
which is part of the CMU Sphinx package [26]. Though it
was quite efficient, it had a large library which was redun-
dant for our use.
For this project, we also developed our own speech recog-
nition algorithm using some of the basic concepts of speech
recognition [19]. We also create our own library of words to
be used. We recorded samples of one of the authors, saying
6 commands namely “left”, “right”, “front”, “down”, “up” and
“down”. The frequency spectrum of the words are shown in
Figure 6. These were recorded at 44100Hz sampling rate.
Each word was recorded for 2 seconds and 100 recordings of
each word were taken in sets of 20 each. The voice samples
were then truncated to the regions with amplitude greater
than a certain threshold so that background noise might be
eliminated. Then the Fourier spectrum of the data collected
is observed. The process of obtaining FFT for each word is
shown in Figure 7. In this figure, the first plot shows the
20 utterances of a word. For example, a person says ’left’
20 times. Each utterance is shown in a different colour.
The X-axis shows the number of samples. Duration of each
recording is 2 second and the sampling frequency is 44100
Hz and hence there are 8.8 × 104 samples in the set. The
Y-axis is the amplitude. In the second graph, all the utter-
ances are made to have uniform length (number of samples)
by cutting off their edges. X-axis again shows the number
of samples and Y-axis shows the amplitude of signals. The
third plot is the average of the FFT of the 20 samples. X-
axis is the frequency in Hz and Y-axis is the amplitude. This
average Fourier spectrum represents each word. A training
set was built using these FFT spectrum. A Naive Bayesian
classifier coupled with K-Nearest Neighbour algorithm were
used to recognize the words. Even though the accuracy was
low, it was adequate for the task.
 While one can use the standard off-the shelf solutions for
processing speech and image signals, our objective in this pa-
per is to demonstrate simple techniques which can be used
even by beginners who might not have in-depth understand-
ing of these fields.
Figure 7. top: 20 utterance of a word ’left’ (x: sam-
ple index, y: magnitude); middle: Signals obtained
cutting off their tails; bottom: Average Fourier
spectrum of the word (x: frequency (kHz), y: am-
plitude)
3.3 Tele-operation over Wi-fi
In hospitals, every disabled or paralyzed patient requires
an attendant for carrying him/her from one place to the
other. This would require having a large set of manpower
engaged in these activities leading to expensive healthcare
costs. Most of the time, a member of the family has to stay
near the patient to take care of this need. The computer-
controlled wheelchair could be used in a tele-operated mode
where a person sitting at one place can drive the wheelchair
remotely and take the patient from one location to another.
The tele-operator can see the path through a camera mounted
on the wheelchair. The video seen through the camera is
streamed over wireless LAN to ensure continuous video ex-
perience at the operator end. We use VLC video stream-
ing software on GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) platform [29] for this
purpose. Wireless LAN connection is available in most of
the hospitals these days and this approach can enable one
operator to assist multiple patients at a given time. The
patient can interact with the operator through microphone
and built-in webcam available on the laptop mounted on the
wheelchair. This can help in reducing the cost of healthcare,
thereby making it affordable to many more families.
4. FUTURE SCOPE AND DEVELOPMENT
One of the challenges is to build a map using only cam-
era without making use of encoders, gyros and accelerom-
eters. The idea is to build a graphical map of the envi-
ronment where each place is identified as a node which is
connected to other nodes via links. The topological maps
thus generated could be used for navigating in an environ-
ment autonomously. Microsoft Kinect [10] [9], being a low
cost sensor, could also be used to generate 3D map of the
environment. This can also be used for navigation and ob-
stacle avoidance. One can also make the wheelchair follow
a human using a Kinect sensor and skeleton detection al-
gorithm [7]. OpenNI [16] is another open source software
which could be used for developing applications for Kinect.
In this paper, we focussed on developing the human robot
interfaces for controlling the robot in a manual mode of op-
eration. In future, we aim to focus on the autonomous mode
of operation, where the robot navigates autonomously based
on pre-defined goals. The goals will be set either by using
voice commands or using vision-based gestures.
We also aim to use this wheelchair as a tele-medicine plat-
form where the diagnostics of the patient could be recorded
through an array of sensors mounted either on the wheelchair
or on the body and transmit it to a remotely located doctor.
In case of emergency, the wheelchair can raise and alarm and
inform a tele-operator for assistance.
5. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we provide details of design and implemen-
tation of a smart wheelchair which can be used for assisting
patients having locomotion related disabilities. Our focus is
to keep the cost of the system low by opting for low cost
sensors and working more on algorithms. In the process, we
demonstrate the use of webcam and microphone to develop
user interfaces where the user can control the wheelchair us-
ing head-tilt or voice commands. We resort to open source
software and hardware technology platforms in order to keep
the total cost low. The smart wheelchair could be made
available at a cost as low as 2000 USD.
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was funded by the Ministry of Human Re-
source Development (MHRD), Govt. of India under the Na-
tional Mission on Education through Information Commu-
nication Technology (NME-ICT) programme for the project
“Robotics for Education”.
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