Motorized Mobile Chair Following Control for User-Adaptive Safety
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current motorized mobile systems lack the ability to adapt to individual users' varying physiological and cognitive abilities, leading to inadequate safety, security, and social independence, as they are not designed to consider users' unique needs and health conditions effectively.
Innovation Solution
The integration of advanced sensor systems, including non-contact sensors and human-machine interfaces, with sensor fusion and advanced filtering techniques, along with secure communication architectures, to provide situational awareness and enhanced autonomy, enabling the motorized mobile system to navigate safely and independently based on user-specific abilities and conditions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If motorized mobile systems use standardized control systems without user-specific adaptation, then device complexity is reduced, but safety and effectiveness deteriorate due to inability to accommodate varying physiological and cognitive abilities
Solution Approach 1:
The system dynamically adapts its control parameters and assistance levels based on real-time sensor data about the user's physiological state and cognitive load. The control system transitions from static, standardized settings to dynamic, user-specific configurations that adjust automatically during operation, thereby improving safety without requiring complex manual reconfiguration.
Solution Approach 2:
The system incorporates continuous feedback loops that monitor user performance, physiological metrics, and environmental conditions. This feedback is processed by the control system to automatically adjust operational parameters, providing adaptive safety mechanisms that respond to individual user needs while maintaining manageable system complexity through automated closed-loop control.
2Loss of information
If motorized mobile systems integrate advanced sensor systems and sensor fusion techniques, then situational awareness and adaptive navigation are improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system merges multiple sensor types (cameras, LIDAR, ultrasonic sensors, inertial measurement units) into a unified sensor fusion framework. By combining data from heterogeneous sensors and processing them through integrated algorithms, the system achieves comprehensive situational awareness that exceeds the capability of individual sensors, while the merging process itself manages complexity through standardized data fusion architectures.
Solution Approach 2:
The sensor system is designed with multi-functionality, where the same sensor array serves multiple purposes: obstacle detection, navigation, user monitoring, and environmental mapping. This universal approach allows the system to gather diverse information simultaneously without proportionally increasing hardware complexity, as single sensor components perform multiple functions.
3Adaptability or versatility
If motorized mobile systems are designed with basic functionality only, then ease of manufacture is improved, but adaptability to individual user needs deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system employs dynamic configuration capabilities where hardware and software components can be adaptively enabled or disabled based on individual user requirements. This allows a single platform to serve multiple user needs with varying levels of complexity, maintaining ease of manufacture for base models while enabling customized adaptations through software configuration and optional module addition rather than requiring completely different systems for each user.
Data Source
AI summary
A system and method for a motorized mobile chair use a plurality of sensors having a plurality of sensor types to detect a plurality of objects and generate sensor data about the detected objects, each of the detected objects being a person, the sensor data about the objects comprising a plurality of range measurements to the people and a plurality of bearing measurements to the people. The system has at least one processor to receive the sensor data about the people, group the detected people into a plurality of zones, determine a closest person in each zone, and generate one or more control signals to cause the motorized mobile chair to match a speed and a direction of the closest person in the zone corresponding to a direction of travel of the motorized mobile chair while at least approximately maintaining a selected space to the closest person in the zone corresponding to the direction of travel of the motorized mobile chair.