Search

Individuals with mobility impairments such as wheelchair users are often at a disadvantage when traveling to a new place, as their mobility can be easily affected by environmental barriers, and as such, even short trips can be difficult and perhaps impossible. We envision a personalized wheelchair navigation system based on a PDA equipped with wireless Internet access and GPS that can provide adaptive navigation support to wheelchair users in any geographic environment. Requirements, architectures and components of such a system are described in this paper.

Map matching is not always perfect and sometimes produces mismatches. Thus, there is a degree of uncertainty for how well a map-matching algorithm will perform under certain circumstances. Circumstantial factors include accuracies of sensor data and surrounding road network structure, among others. This paper attempts to shed light on this uncertainty and proposes a methodology for predicting performances of map matching algorithms at given locations on a digital road network. In short, using a vehicle's position, the proposed methodology can be employed to predict the performance of a map-matching algorithm at that position. Since map-matching algorithms are different in their logic of matching vehicle's positions to road segments, there should be a separate prediction algorithm based on the methodology for each map-matching algorithm. To demonstrate the methodology's benefits, a probability algorithm to predict the performance of a point-to-curve map-matching algorithm is outlined.