News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Tennessee Tech Student Kadyn Brady is hoping his AI wheelchair can bring the outdoors to wheelchair users.
When Brady was invited to participate in an autonomous wheelchair project, he said he had two reasons to get involved. Brady said his grandmother had had to use a wheelchair and he felt an outdoor design could have given her more independence. Additionally, he said he was given the opportunity to use control systems to navigate outdoor terrains.
“Of course you can’t really map all of the outdoor and hope to store it all on a single computer,” Brady said. “So we had to make it where we’re just recognizing the sidewalk itself and then steering that instead of trying to recognize everything all at once.”
Brady said the project was the next step in a previous indoor chair that relied on lidar, which maps out the area of a room. He said that method does not work if you imagine mapping out an endless map as you move through the outdoors.
Brady said he quickly realized his work would have to rely on a completely different design.
“One of the benefits of using artificial intelligence, we could actually train the neural network we use on multiple different shades of sidewalk colors. So the network is actually able to recognize difference without having to do much work training it.”
Although Brady completed the design for an autonomous chair that he could use, he said the design will be picked up by another student in the future. He said there were safety issues to be addressed in order for the chair to be acceptable for the general public.
“I believe the biggest challenge right now is taking the indoor and outdoor systems and merging them together as well as improving the safety aspects to make sure it could be a commercial option available to the disabled,” Brady said.
Brady said a lot of what he learned in using the AI with control systems transferred nicely into his new job as a controls engineer. He said he was thankful to professor Ali Alouani and associate professor Tarek Elfouly for giving him the opportunity to enrich his experience at Tennessee Tech.
