Prototype of the Solution with a View to Industrialization

The development of a wheelchair to help people with mobility impairments (PMI) in their daily life is a very important topic that interest researchers. The introduction of new technologies can provide these wheelchairs with very interesting and useful functionalities. However, the proposed functionalities increase the cost of the electrical or the smart wheelchair. The main concern of disabled people is how they can access these advanced services at a reasonable cost. The objective of this paper is to describe the development of an intelligent module for standard Manual Wheelchair (MWC) available in the Algerian market. The proposed solution targets to minimize, as much as possible, the number of modifications needed to transform a MWC to an Electric/Smart wheelchair (EWC/SWC). To this end, a 3D model of the standard wheelchair is designed by using a Computer Aided Design (CAD) tool to test & validate the integration of the smart module. Also, a 3D simulation model of the designed wheelchair navigation and its environment was developed by using Gazebo integrated in the Robot Operating System (ROS) to test & validate the proposed artificial vision for obstacle avoidance module. The results of simulation demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture.