Thursday 26.01.12

Navigation System for Electric Wheelchairs

Dominik Franke Embedded Software Laboratory

Sometimes the battery charge state of his electric wheelchair is too low to take a ride to the university and back home. Dzenan Dzafic is a computer science student at the RWTH Aachen University. He used his knowledge about computer science to develop a mobile navigation system for electric wheelchairs, which next to a short and fast route computes an efficient route, regarding the altitude profile of the streets.

Together with Dipl.-Inform. Dominik Franke, scientific assistant at the Embedded Software Laboratory (Prof. Kowalewski), he defined the algorithm based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. A key motivation was Dzafic's personal experience that short ways are not necessarily efficient ways, regarding the power consumption of electric wheel chairs. If the road is steep, electric wheelchairs do even consume exponential more power than on a less steep road. Thanks to UMIC and the Undergraduate Research Funds both researchers were able to present their work through papers and presentations on the FOSSGIS in Heidelberg and AGIT in Salzburg.

To make this extended navigation system work reliable in different regions, altitude data information of streets is required. One problem is that for a huge part of Germany altitude data is missing in OSM. In other map services it is rarely available, and neither free nor precise. The advantage with OSM is the possibility for every user to add altitude data to each street. So one current focus of the project is to add altitude data for the region of Aachen to the OSM database, so that the navigation system will at least work reliable in the area of Aachen. Other cities like Heidelberg have already lots of altitude data in their OSM maps, as a consequence of some projects from the university in Heidelberg.

The implemented navigation system is currently available through a web interface and a mobile client for Android, called eNav (see https://embedded.rwth-aachen.de/doku.php?id=forschung:enav). To build this project up, there is still a lot of work to do. So the team looks for further students, which are interested to support this project. Furthermore this concept is not only restricted to the area of electric wheelchairs. It also applies to electric vehicles in general. As the road to go is still long, new interested parties and challenges rise along.

German version see File/006_Navigation für Elektrorollstuehle.pdf

---