Development of an Autonomous Driving Smart Wheelchair for the Physically Weak

People who have difficulty moving owing to problems in walking spend their lives assisted by wheelchairs. In the past, research has been conducted regarding the application of various technologies to electric wheelchairs for user convenience. In this study, we evaluated a method of applying an autonomous driving function and developed an autonomous driving function using ROS. An electric wheelchair with a control unit designed to enable autonomous driving was used to test the basic performance of autonomous driving. The effectiveness of the technology was confirmed by comparing the results of autonomous driving with those of manual driving on the same route. It is expected that the evaluation and improvement of the usability and ride quality as well as additional studies will help improve the mobility convenience of physically disabled persons.

Application and research of robot sorting system based on LabVIEW

Sorting robot is a kind of artificial intelligence robot which has certain sense ability and can classify items. In the sorting industry, its appearance not only reduces the labor input, but also improves the production efficiency of the sorting industry. In this paper, a production line composed of linear Delta robot and 3-DOF robot is studied. The forward and inverse solutions are calculated by MATLAB and simulated by Solid Works. Through the visual processing function, communication function and axle card driving function of Lab VIEW software, the servo motor rotation is controlled to achieve the purpose of the end moving along the predetermined trajectory, and finally the visual sorting function is realized.

Context-Adaptive Availability Notifications for an SAE Level 3 Automation

Context-adaptive functions are not new in the driving context, but even so, investigations into these functions concerning the automation human–machine interface (aHMI) have yet to be carried out. This study presents research into context-adaptive availability notifications for an SAE Level 3 automation in scenarios where participants were surprised by either availability or non-availability. For this purpose, participants (N = 30) took part in a driving simulator study, experiencing a baseline HMI concept as a comparison, and a context-adaptive HMI concept that provided context-adaptive availability notifications with the aim of improving acceptance and usability, while decreasing frustration (due to unexpected non-availability) and gaze deviation from the road when driving manually. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that participants, when experiencing the context-adaptive HMI, would activate the automated driving function more quickly when facing unexpected availability. None of the hypotheses could be statistically confirmed; indeed, where gaze behavior was concerned, the opposite effects were found, indicating increased distraction induced by the context-adaptive HMI. However, the trend in respect to the activation time was towards shorter times with the context-adaptive notifications. These results led to the conclusion that context-adaptive availability notifications might not always be beneficial for users, while more salient availability notifications in the case of an unexpected availability could be advantageous.

A Generic Interface Enabling Combinations of State-of-the-Art Path Planning and Tracking Algorithms

In the development of Level 4 automated driving functions, very specific, but diverse, requirements with respect to the operational design domain have to be considered. In order to accelerate this development, it is advantageous to combine dedicated state-of-the-art software components, as building blocks in modular automated driving function architectures, instead of developing special solutions from scratch. However, e.g., in local motion planning and control, the combination of components is still limited in practice, due to necessary interface alignments, which might yield sub-optimal solutions and additional development overhead. The application of generic interfaces, which manage the data transfer between the software components, has the potential to avoid these drawbacks and hence, to further boost this development approach. This publication contributes such a generic interface concept between the local path planning and path tracking systems. The crucial point is a generalization of the lateral tracking error computation, based on an introduced error classification. It substantiates the integration of an internal reference path representation into the interface, to resolve the component interdependencies. The resulting, proposed interface enables arbitrary combinations of components from a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art path planning and tracking algorithms. Two interface implementations are finally applied in an exemplary automated driving function assembly task.

Controlled Loewner-Kufarev Equation Embedded into the Universal Grassmannian

We introduce the class of controlled Loewner-Kufarev equations and consider aspects of their algebraic nature. We lift the solution of such a controlled equation to the (Sato)-Segal-Wilson Grassmannian, and discuss its relation with the tau-function. We briefly highlight relations of the Grunsky matrix with integrable systems and conformal field theory. Our main result is the explicit formula which expresses the solution of the controlled equation in terms of the signature of the driving function through the action of words in generators of the Witt algebra.