GIMnet on the MICA Wheelchair

This paper describes the implementation of GIMnet on the MICA wheelchair. 1. The MICA wheelchair The wheelchair seen in Figure 1, is behind all the fancy equipment an ordinary electrical driven wheelchair. It has during several years of development been transformed into it’s current state, known as the Mobile Internet Connected Assistant, MICA. The concept behind the wheelchair is to do research on navigation systems that can help elderly and dis-abled people to manage daily life without help from other people. This kind of research requires flexible software that allow (relatively) easy implementation and testing of algorithms. Besides that, the wheelchair is also used as general test vehicle for other types of autonomous functionality. Our requirements on a software platform is the possibility to share sensor-data between different pro-grams. We also want easily managed remote commu-nication over Ethernet/Wlan. Furthermore, the idea is to build up a library of software/drivers for sensors and equipment that can be reused in other projects. Since GIMnet more or less meets all these requirements ”out of the box ” the choice was not hard to leave all old code and do a total makeover of our software platform. 1.1. MICA in press The MICA wheelchair has, before GIMnet was im-plemented, been involved in several projects [3] [4] [6] [7] [5], as a platform for different experiments concern-ing robotics. The GIMnet implementation on MICA was per-formed during 2009 as a master thesis [1]. In [2], MICA, with GIMnet, served as instrument carrier for two laser scanners