Cordless cart follower for wheelchair user

Abstract

A wheelchair bound person requires the freedom of upper limb body movement to move around. Any attachment to the wheelchair in the form of luggage will restrict the performance of such person to navigate the wheelchair. Poor navigation of a wheelchair might, in the worst case scenario, lead to an accident that would cause injury to the person. In addition, the durability of the wheelchair might also be affected if the weight put onto it is increase. In this project, a cart follower is introduced to overcome the above mentioned problems faced by wheelchair bound person who need to carry around their luggage. The cart follower has been specifically designed for wheelchair bound persons to help them carry around their luggage. It will automatically track and follow the wheelchair without any attachment or cord between the wheelchair and the cart.Microcontroller, sensors, motors, and servo are used in order to achieve the objective. A CMUCam3 camera with vision sensors is used to track an object, which is in this case, a predefined color from an image pattern. The cart will only move when the configured color is detected and stops when there is no configured color detected. The cart will move backward in decreasing speed from 100 to 70 percent duty cycle if the infrared distance sensor detects an obstacle or if the wheelchair is in the range of 10-28cm a head and then maintains a distance of 28cm as the wheelchair is moving backward. Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) is applied to control the speed and a servo motor is used to control the angle rotation of the cart. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.