Navigating a Robotic Wheelchair in a Railway Station During Rush-Hour

In this paper we describe the hardware design, the control and navigation system, and our preliminary experiments with the robotic wheelchair MAid (Mobility Aid for Elderly and Disabled People). MAid's general task is to transport people with severely impaired motion skills such as, for example, paraplegia, multiple sclerosis, poliomyelitis, or muscular dystrophy. Following the advice of disabled people and physicians we did not set out to re-invent and re-develop the set of standard skills of so-called intelligent wheelchairs, such as FollowWall, FollowCorridor, PassDoorway which are commonly described in the literature. These maneuvers do not always require fine motion control and disabled people, in spite of their disability, are often well capable of navigating their wheelchair along a corridor and actually eager to do it. In our work we focused instead on maneuvers which are very burdensome because they take a long time and require extreme attention. One of these functions is deli..