Stairs Detection for Enhancing Wheelchair Capabilities Based on Radar Sensors
This addresses mobility barriers for powered wheelchair users by enabling automated obstacle crossing, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing radar sensing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting stairs to enhance wheelchair mobility by introducing a mirror-based 2D FMCW radar scanner, which was tested under laboratory and realistic conditions.
Powered wheelchair users encounter barriers to their mobility everyday. Entering a building with non barrier-free areas can massively impact the user mobility related activities. There are a few commercial devices and some experimental that can climb stairs using for instance adaptive wheels with joints or caterpillar drive. These systems rely on the use for sensing and control. For safe automated obstacle crossing, a robust and environment invariant detection of the surrounding is necessary. Radar may prove to be a suitable sensor for its capability to handle harsh outdoor environmental conditions. In this paper, we introduce a mirror based two dimensional Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radar scanner for stair detection. A radar image based stair dimensioning approach is presented and tested under laboratory and realistic conditions.