Terrain identification for intelligent wheelchairs based on geometric properties computation.

With the development of science and technology, intelligent wheelchairs play a key role in the daily life of the elderly. Terrain identification technology plays an important role in the operation of intelligent wheelchairs. In this paper, a typical terrain identification method for road surfaces based on geometric properties computation is proposed. The identification method is divided into four steps. The first step is to collect 3D point cloud data of the terrain in the forward direction through the scanning device carried by the intelligent wheelchair. The second step is to calculate the geometric properties of the point cloud data. The third step is to identify discontinuous points in the point cloud data through the computation results of geometric properties. The fourth step is to identify the terrain according to the type and number of discontinuous points. The identification experiments show that the proposed method has high accuracy.