Service Point Searching for Disabled People using Wheelchair based Robotic Path Planning and ArUco Markers.

The relative growth in the number of elderly individuals, especially those who are incapable of self-movement, and the decreasing number of care personnel is a challenging issue to handle. An automated robotic Wheelchair with an expert system can provide the services to the elderly and physically challenged people. However, optimal path finding and object or obstacle identification are major concerns to be optimized. With this point in mind, this paper proposes an automated robotic Wheelchair with ArUco marker-based target service point's identification and an efficient robotic path planning algorithm. It can also avoid the obstacles and search for the service points using an image processing-based low computational system. An improved A * path planning algorithm makes the shortest path from the source to the target service point in this proposed method. An ArUco Marker-based low-competition system is used for obstacle avoidance and service point searching. It can also adjust the path if an obstacle appears on the planned route. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, including service point searching, obstacle avoidance, and shortest path finding.