A motion control method of intelligent wheelchair based on hand gesture recognition

This research work is related to develop a motion control system of intelligent wheelchair based on hand gesture recognition for those with physical accessibility problem. In this paper, the accelerations of a hand in motion in three perpendicular directions are detected by a MEMS accelerometer and transmitted to a PC via Bluetooth wireless protocol. An automatic gesture segmentation algorithm is developed to identify individual gestures in a sequence and the Hidden Markov Model(HMM) is used for the hand gesture model training. After this, the trained gesture model and Bayes method are combined to recognize the gestures from the sensing data sequences. When the gesture information is transferred into the corresponding wheelchair motion, S-Curve function is adopted to connect the velocities of the neighboring motions. This would insure the wheelchair´s motion to be smoothed. Simulations showed the effectiveness of recognition method and smoothed motion of intelligent wheelchair under control.