Navigating a robotic wheelchair in a railway station during rush hour

This paper describes the hardware design, control and navigation system of and some preliminary experiments with the robotic wheelchair Mobility Aid f or elderly and disabled people (MAid). MAid's general task is to transport people with severely impaired motion skills. The authors did not set out to reinvent and redevelop the set of standard skills of so-called intelligent wheelchairs, such as FollowWall, FollowCorridor; PassDoorway which are com monly described in the literature. These maneuvers require motion control s kills that disabled people, in spite of their disabilities, are eager to le arn and quire good at using. Instead, this work focused on generalizing the approach to fine motion control by considering those maneuvers identified as very burdensome due to their duration and required concentration. One of these functions is deliberative locomotion in rapidly changing, large-scal e environments, such as shopping malls, entry halls of theaters, and concou rses of airports or railway stations, where tens or hundreds of people and objects move around MAid's performance was tested in the central station of Ulm during rush hour and in the exhibition halls of the Hannover Messe '98 , the largest industrial fair in the world. Altogether MAid has survived mo re than 36 h of testing in public, crowded environments with heavy passenge r traffic.