Doorway passing of an intelligent wheelchair by dynamically generating Bézier curve trajectory

Door passing is the basic capability of an intelligent wheelchair. This paper presents a novel strategy to address the door passing issue by dynamically generating the Bézier curve based trajectory. It consists of door finding, optimization based trajectory generation and tracking control, which are executed repeatedly to increase the ability of passing the door and improve the performance. Whenever the door is detected, the optimization method produces a new smooth reference trajectory in real time for the wheelchair to follow. The proposed approach is tested in reality to verify its feasibility and efficiency, and the experimental results show its good performance in terms of the accuracy of finding the door and passing the doorway. © 2012 IEEE.