Search for: All records

Research on robotic wheelchairs covers a broad range from complete autonomy to shared autonomy to manual navigation by a joystick or other means. Shared autonomy is valuable because it allows the user and the robot to complement each other, to correct each other's mistakes and to avoid collisions. In this paper, we present an approach that can learn to replicate path selection according to the wheelchair user's individual, often subjective, criteria in order to reduce the number of times the user has to intervene during automatic navigation. This is achieved by learning to rank paths using a support vector machine trained on selections made by the user in a simulator. If the classifier's confidence in the top ranked path is high, it is executed without requesting confirmation from the user. Otherwise, the choice is deferred to the user. Simulations and laboratory experiments using two path generation strategies demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. 

Motivated by the need to improve the quality of life for the elderly and disabled individuals who rely on wheelchairs for mobility, and who may have limited or no hand functionality at all, we propose an egocentric computer vision based co-robot wheelchair to enhance their mobility without hand usage. The robot is built using a commercially available powered wheelchair modified to be controlled by head motion. Head motion is measured by tracking an egocentric camera mounted on the user’s head and faces outward. Compared with previous approaches to hands-free mobility, our system provides a more natural human robot interface because it enables the user to control the speed and direction of motion in a continuous fashion, as opposed to providing a small number of discrete commands. This article presents three usability studies, which were conducted on 37 subjects. The first two usability studies focus on comparing the proposed control method with existing solutions while the third study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of training subjects to operate the wheelchair over several sessions. A limitation of our studies is that they have been conducted with healthy participants. Our findings, however, pave the way for further studies with subjects with disabilities.