Developing Cost-Effective Robot Navigation

This thesis discusses the partial development of a smart wheelchair robot. The purpose of the smart wheelchair is to provide transportation to wheelchair bound persons by use of an autonomous system. The user must only issue high level commands such as "take me to the bookstore," and the robot will adapt its planning and intelligence accordingly. The main function of the smart wheelchair is transportation, so it follows that the most important aspect of the wheelchair is its ability to navigate. Robot navigation is a difficult but well studied problem. However, the smart wheelchair is unique in that it has strict cost requirements. This constraint limits the effectiveness of the techniques currently used in the field.;The smart wheelchair project is still under development at the VADER Laboratory. The author's contributions to the project during his course of study are discussed in this thesis. Contributions include the initial work required to make the robot platform functional, the basic navigation software and improvements made to it, a low cost self-contained pose system, and terrain classification. Terrain classification is prerequisite for the future work of dynamic drive control profile selection for improved navigation. This thesis gives perspective to the problem of robot navigation for low cost platforms and small development teams.