Event-based and Multi Agent Control of an Innovative Wheelchair

12th European Workshop on Advanced Control and Diagnosis

Diomin, U.^1 ; Witczak, P.^2 ; Stetter, R.^3

Brest State Technical University, Brest, Belarus^1

University of Zielona Gora, Zielona Gora, Poland^2

Hochschule Ravensburg-Weingarten, Weingarten, Germany^3

关键词: Asynchronous event;    Autonomous operations;    Control problems;    Event-based control;    Mechanical design;    Mobility assistance;    Multi-agent based approach;    Multiagent control;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/659/1/012050/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1742-6596/659/1/012050

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

Due to the aging population more and more people require mobility assistance in form of a wheelchair. Generally it would be desirable that such wheelchairs would be easy to use and would allow their users the possibility to move in any direction at any time. Concepts which allow such movements are existing since many years but have for several reasons not found their way to the market. Additionally for semi-autonomous (assisted) operation and fully autonomous operation (e. g. an empty wheelchair driving to its charging station) the control task is much less challenging for such drive system, because no complex manoeuvres needs to be considered and planned. In an ongoing research a drive system for a wheelchair was developed which offers such possibilities employing a relatively simple mechanical design. This drive system is based on a certain steering principle which is based on torque differences between different wheels. This allows a relatively simple mechanical design but poses challenges on the control of the vehicle. This paper describes two possible approaches to address this challenge - the use of an event based control and the application of multiple software agents. Both approaches can solve the control problem individually but can also complement each other for better system performance. The paper stars with a description of the wheelchair drive system. Then the asynchronous event based control software is described as well the multi agent based approach. The next sections report the results of the experiments and discuss the further improvements.