Stairs Detection for Enhancing Wheelchair Capabilities Based on Radar Sensors

Powered wheelchair users encounter barriers to their mobility everyday. Entering a building with non barrier-free areas can massively impact the user mobility related activities. There are a few commercial devices and some experimental that can climb stairs using for instance adaptive wheels with jo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2017-11
Main Authors: Abdulatif, Sherif, Kleiner, Bernhard, Aziz, Fady, Riehs, Christopher, Cooper, Rory, Schneider, Urs
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptive systems
Automatic control
Continuous radiation
Image detection
Radar detection
Radar imaging
Wheelchairs
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Powered wheelchair users encounter barriers to their mobility everyday. Entering a building with non barrier-free areas can massively impact the user mobility related activities. There are a few commercial devices and some experimental that can climb stairs using for instance adaptive wheels with joints or caterpillar drive. These systems rely on the use for sensing and control. For safe automated obstacle crossing, a robust and environment invariant detection of the surrounding is necessary. Radar may prove to be a suitable sensor for its capability to handle harsh outdoor environmental conditions. In this paper, we introduce a mirror based two dimensional Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radar scanner for stair detection. A radar image based stair dimensioning approach is presented and tested under laboratory and realistic conditions.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1711.09206