A Real-time Obstacle Avoidance Strategy for Safe Autonomous Navigation of Intelligent Hospital Beds in Dynamic Uncertain Environments

We present a reactive navigation algorithm for safe operation of hospital beds in dynamic environments. The proposed navigation is implementation efficient in the sense that it does not require any measurements from the velocities, shapes, dimensions or orientations of the obstacles. Furthermore, it is applicable for a variety of real world scenario where the natures and the motions of the obstacles are not known, and the shapes of the obstacles may be time-varying and deforming. The only information available for computation of control signals is the minimum distance from the hospital bed to the closest obstacle. The mathematically rigorous analysis of the proposed navigation algorithm is presented and its performance is demonstrated by the computer simulations and real world experiments with a hospital bed control system (Flexbed).