FPGA based wheelchair autonavigation for people with mobility issues

About 65 million people out of 650 million with disabilities in the world require wheelchairs for mobility. Only a minority of them have access to electric wheelchairs in developing and underdeveloped nations. The count is even less when it comes to sophisticated wheelchairs. These electric wheelchairs come with joystick control which is not suitable for people with stroke and spinal cord injury. In this research work we propose a FPGA based solution for automatic navigation of electric wheelchairs in indoor navigation. The house floor is divided into virtual grids with specific co-ordinates assigned to each grid. As a predefined path is fed into the system to reach a destination from a source the system works faster compared to the specific path finding algorithms for path calculation. The Matlab implementation and the Verilog HDL implementation, analysis, synthesis are discussed detailed in this paper.