  Loss of Mobility is a common handicap to senior citizens. It denies them the
ease of movement they would like to have like outdoor visits, movement in
hospitals, social outgoings, but more seriously in the day to day in-house
routine functions necessary for living etc. Trying to overcome this handicap by
means of servant or domestic help and simple wheel chairs is not only costly in
the long run, but forces the senior citizen to be at the mercy of sincerity of
domestic helps and also the consequent loss of dignity. In order to give a
dignified life, the mobility obtained must be at the complete discretion, will
and control of the senior citizen. This can be provided only by a reasonably
sophisticated and versatile wheel chair, giving enhanced ability of vision,
hearing through man-machine interface, and sensor aided navigation and control.
More often than not senior people have poor vision which makes it difficult for
them to maker visual judgement and so calls for the use of Artificial
Intelligence in visual image analysis and guided navigation systems.
  In this project, we deal with two important enhancement features for mobility
enhancement, Audio command and Vision aided obstacle detection and navigation.
We have implemented speech recognition algorithm using template of stored words
for identifying the voice command given by the user. This frees the user of an
agile hand to operate joystick or mouse control. Also, we have developed a new
appearance based obstacle detection system using stereo-vision cameras which
estimates the distance of nearest obstacle to the wheel chair and takes
necessary action. This helps user in making better judgement of route and
navigate obstacles. The main challenge in this project is how to navigate in an
unknown/unfamiliar environment by avoiding obstacles.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Robotics