A challenge to any expert parallaxian botista!!
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So I just had this very cool idea for a project, the problem is there is no way I could afford to even begin on it at this point in time. Although this project is pretty pricey it may be able to be sold as anew product if you were in to that.
So I live in a pretty small town and as I walk around during the day job hunting I see lots of elderly folk driving there electric wheelchairs as there main source of transportation. Why not the weather is nice in SoCal and you can walk from one end of town to the other in 2 hours, so I'm sure on a zippy rascal you could do it in 45 minutes or so.
Today when I was browsing Angel View I saw a jazzy scooter for 500 dollars, and thought to myself, "Man it would be nice to pick that up and use its base as a chassis for an outdoors robot!". Later I thought back to this project I saw on hack a day where a guy built a self balancing electric unicycle and thought about how neat it would be to ride around on a hand built electric vehicle. Then it hit me!! Why not just make a full wheel chair in to a robot, then you would have a robot you could actually ride! Basically you could take any robot you've already made that has good object detection and odometry and connect it to the wheel chairs H Bridge. Throw a GPS on there and you could program it to autonomously drive you to the store. Add blue tooth and maybe you could set you GPS way point with Google maps or something. If one were able to figure out an easy way to make this something you just kind of plug in to most wheelchairs it would allow all those people to read a book while there chair took them to the grocery store or wherever they are going.
For price sake as a product and size, I think the whole thing should only rely on micro controllers, maybe an SBC. There is no need for a full blown PC in this scenario so this could acually be a pretty small black box you tap in to the h bridge and then maybe string some pings and IR sensors around the wheelchair.
So I live in a pretty small town and as I walk around during the day job hunting I see lots of elderly folk driving there electric wheelchairs as there main source of transportation. Why not the weather is nice in SoCal and you can walk from one end of town to the other in 2 hours, so I'm sure on a zippy rascal you could do it in 45 minutes or so.
Today when I was browsing Angel View I saw a jazzy scooter for 500 dollars, and thought to myself, "Man it would be nice to pick that up and use its base as a chassis for an outdoors robot!". Later I thought back to this project I saw on hack a day where a guy built a self balancing electric unicycle and thought about how neat it would be to ride around on a hand built electric vehicle. Then it hit me!! Why not just make a full wheel chair in to a robot, then you would have a robot you could actually ride! Basically you could take any robot you've already made that has good object detection and odometry and connect it to the wheel chairs H Bridge. Throw a GPS on there and you could program it to autonomously drive you to the store. Add blue tooth and maybe you could set you GPS way point with Google maps or something. If one were able to figure out an easy way to make this something you just kind of plug in to most wheelchairs it would allow all those people to read a book while there chair took them to the grocery store or wherever they are going.
For price sake as a product and size, I think the whole thing should only rely on micro controllers, maybe an SBC. There is no need for a full blown PC in this scenario so this could acually be a pretty small black box you tap in to the h bridge and then maybe string some pings and IR sensors around the wheelchair.
Comments
There have been lots of robots built from a wheel chair as a base (or at least the motors/wheels). One of the largest robots I have is based on one for the drivetrain.
If you keep searching your local Craigslist you can often find them for less than that. It may take a whiel but one may turn up. Also watch for estate sales since they could have one too.
Lawsuits, litigation, liability.