**5. Conclusion**

In this study, the conversion procedure of a conventional electric wheelchair into an autonomous personal transportation testbed is described in detail. The conversion process is investigated under two main sections. The first part is by-wire conversion that allows the wheelchair to be controlled via digital commands. The second part includes the studies on the sensors, computational system and human-machine interface. Sensors and computational hardware that have different characteristics are included in the system for comparison and optimization of their performance in the future. The platform was tested using SLAM and AMCL algorithms for mapping and localization successfully. It is observed that the constructed map using industrial LIDAR and odometry data is almost the same with the real map and localization performance is acceptable for the next studies.

In the future, we plan to use the wheelchair as a research platform to further improve the autonomous personal transportation algorithms that will be used in narrow and cluttered environments. Comparison of localization and mapping performance of different methods and sensors in such environments will be studied as well.

## **Acknowledgements**

This work was supported by the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council (TUBITAK) under project no. 118E809.

**89**

**Author details**

Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey

provided the original work is properly cited.

\*Address all correspondence to: sezerv@itu.edu.tr

*Conversion of a Conventional Wheelchair into an Autonomous Personal Transportation Testbed*

Volkan Sezer\*, Rahman Salim Zengin, Hosein Houshyari and Murat Cenk Yilmaz

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93117*

*Conversion of a Conventional Wheelchair into an Autonomous Personal Transportation Testbed DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93117*
