Autonomous Driving Robot Wheelchairs for Smart Hospitals

This paper introduces a robot wheelchair with autonomous driving for smart hospitals. The robot is with multiple ultrasonic sensors, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth modules and etc. Thus, the robot wheelchair safely moves patients with mobility difficulties to their destinations in a large and complex structure of hospitals. In addition, the robot wheelchair collects obstacle information and send it to the control server in smart hospitals. Experiment results show that the robot wheelchair moves without collision and collects obstacle information.

1. Introduction

Recently, the technology of autonomous driving for robots is one of the major topics in industrial and engineering fields since robots with mobility ability can replace humans in various environments, i.e., autonomous cars, delivery robots, service robots in restaurants, and etc [1] [2]. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel service robot, i.e., robot wheelchair with autonomous driving, with collecting obstacle information for smart hospitals.