Dr. Muhammad Tahir

Many disabled people of our society suffer from mobility issues and fatigue problems in operating the ordinary wheelchairs. Keeping in view the problems faced by such partially disabled persons, the aim of this project is to make a gesture controlled wheelchair which would be easy to operate and safe to drive because of its obstacle avoidance feature. The aim is accomplished using a microcontroller programmed in such a way that drives the wheelchair intelligently based on environment perception and user�s input. The system proposed uses a low cost accelerometer module to take users input in order to control the wheelchair. The hand gestures are recognized according to the angle given by the accelerometer module which is fed to the controller which then decides the motion of the wheelchair. The ultrasonic sensors integrated on the wheelchair grant it additional features such as obstacle avoidance, edge detection etc. The microcontroller serves as the core of the system as it takes inputs from different modules and then decides the input to the motors of the wheelchair by changing the PWMS generated at its pins. The possible movements given by the user�s gesture are forward, backward, left, right and stop and user could rely on the wheelchair in avoiding obstacles and edges.