Fuzzy controller based subsumption behavior architecture for autonomous robotic wheelchair

This paper presents the design and implementation of fuzzy controller based subsumption behavior architecture for controlling an autonomous robotic wheelchair. Behaviors of autonomous robotic wheelchair generally developed with one or more basic behaviors such as goal seeking, wall following, obstacle avoidance and finding target based on different environmental conditions. Therefore, to maximize the navigation performance, fuzzy controller based subsumption behavior architecture is proposed as a sensor fusion algorithm and to find most suitable robotic wheelchair behavior according to environment condition. The arbitrate competition is used to decide which behavior controller has a higher priority, then robotic wheelchair can be controlled by the highest priority behavior during the robotic wheelchair movement towards the goal or target. In order to verify our approach, a robotic wheelchair is controlled with a microcontroller for motion control and sensors information acquisition, personal computer connects to a web-camera for visual localization. The experiment of simulation and test results were presented to show the validity of the proposed method.