A behavior-based architecture for the control of an intelligent powered wheelchair

Autonomous robot architectures typically fall within two camps, top-down symbolic AI systems, and physically grounded bottom-up reactive systems. In this paper, we present a novel behavior fusion based architecture for the control of an intelligent powered wheelchair, which takes advantage of the modularity presented by the reactive bottom-up design, the inference mechanism of symbolic AI systems, and the flexibility of the layered architecture. Thus, this control architecture of wheelchair can realize the multi-level information fusion and facilitates task and information sharing and trading between man and machine. In addition, the basic behaviors and their fusion algorithm are also described.