Aided navigation for disabled people: route recognition

In the last decade, several international researchers have developed intelligent wheelchairs for disabled people. Many of these projects have founded their control structure on a sensor-referenced control. Many types of control are available in this area, but the final choice is in charge of the user. A previous work has established a behavior based control, multi agent based control, which ensures the best choice of the control in a given local context according to user´s preferences. In fact, this control tries to merge the man and the machine, in order to make a symbiosis to make the machine easily acceptable and the control more efficient. In this paper another approach, based on this behavior based structure, tries to assist the user in a global way. Using a modeling of the more often used routes, the intelligent system will assist the user in navigation by proposing the next movement in the case of a recognized route. This will avoid a new direction definition for the user, which can be long and difficult according to the pathology.