Multimodal Control of a Robotic Wheelchair: Using Contextual Information for Usability Improvement

International audienceIn this paper, a method to perform semi-autonomous navigation on a wheelchair is presented. The wheelchair could be controlled in semi-autonomous mode estimating the user's intention by using a face pose recognition system or in manual mode. The estimator was performed within a Bayesian network approach. To switch these two modes, a speech interface was used. The user's intention was modeled as a set of typical destinations visited by the user. The algorithm was implemented to one experimental wheelchair robot. The new application of the wheelchair system with more natural and easy-to-use human machine interfaces was one of the main contributions. as user's habits and points of interest are employed to infer the user's desired destination in a map. Erroneous steering signals coming from the user- machine interface input are filtered out, improving the overall performance of the system. Human aware navigation, path planning and obstacle avoidance are performed by the robotic wheelchair while the user is just concerned with "looking where he wants to go"

A Low-Cost Tele-Presence Wheelchair System

This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a tele-presence wheelchair system based on tele-presence robot, intelligent wheelchair, and touch screen technologies. The tele-presence wheelchair system consists of a commercial electric wheelchair, an add-on tele-presence interaction module, and a touchable live video image based user interface (called TIUI). The tele-presence interaction module is used to provide video-chatting for an elderly or disabled person with the family members or caregivers, and also captures the live video of an environment for tele-operation and semi-autonomous navigation. The user interface developed in our lab allows an operator to access the system anywhere and directly touch the live video image of the wheelchair to push it as if he/she did it in the presence. This paper also discusses the evaluation of the user experience

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Towards Early Mobility Independence: An Intelligent Paediatric Wheelchair with Case Studies

Standard powered wheelchairs are still heavily dependent on the cognitive capabilities of users. Unfortunately, this excludes disabled users who lack the required problem-solving and spatial skills, particularly young children. For these children to be denied powered mobility is a crucial set-back; exploration is important for their cognitive, emotional and psychosocial development. In this paper, we present a safer paediatric wheelchair: the Assistive Robot Transport for Youngsters (ARTY). The fundamental goal of this research is to provide a key-enabling technology to young children who would otherwise be unable to navigate independently in their environment. In addition to the technical details of our smart wheelchair, we present user-trials with able-bodied individuals as well as one 5-year-old child with special needs. ARTY promises to provide young children with early access to the path towards mobility independence

Assistive trajectories for human-in-the-loop mobile robotic platforms

Autonomous and semi-autonomous smoothly interruptible trajectories are developed which are highly suitable for application in tele-operated mobile robots, operator on-board military mobile ground platforms, and other mobility assistance platforms. These trajectories will allow a navigational system to provide assistance to the operator in the loop, for purpose built robots or remotely operated platforms. This will allow the platform to function well beyond the line-of-sight of the operator, enabling remote operation inside a building, surveillance, or advanced observations whilst keeping the operator in a safe location. In addition, on-board operators can be assisted to navigate without collision when distracted, or under-fire, or when physically disabled by injury

Multimodal Control of a Robotic Wheelchair: Using Contextual Information for Usability Improvement

International audienceIn this paper, a method to perform semi-autonomous navigation on a wheelchair is presented. The wheelchair could be controlled in semi-autonomous mode estimating the user's intention by using a face pose recognition system or in manual mode. The estimator was performed within a Bayesian network approach. To switch these two modes, a speech interface was used. The user's intention was modeled as a set of typical destinations visited by the user. The algorithm was implemented to one experimental wheelchair robot. The new application of the wheelchair system with more natural and easy-to-use human machine interfaces was one of the main contributions. as user's habits and points of interest are employed to infer the user's desired destination in a map. Erroneous steering signals coming from the user- machine interface input are filtered out, improving the overall performance of the system. Human aware navigation, path planning and obstacle avoidance are performed by the robotic wheelchair while the user is just concerned with "looking where he wants to go"

Assistive Planning in Complex, Dynamic Environments: a Probabilistic Approach

We explore the probabilistic foundations of shared control in complex dynamic environments. In order to do this, we formulate shared control as a random process and describe the joint distribution that governs its behavior. For tractability, we model the relationships between the operator, autonomy, and crowd as an undirected graphical model. Further, we introduce an interaction function between the operator and the robot, that we call "agreeability"; in combination with the methods developed in~\cite{trautman-ijrr-2015}, we extend a cooperative collision avoidance autonomy to shared control. We therefore quantify the notion of simultaneously optimizing over agreeability (between the operator and autonomy), and safety and efficiency in crowded environments. We show that for a particular form of interaction function between the autonomy and the operator, linear blending is recovered exactly. Additionally, to recover linear blending, unimodal restrictions must be placed on the models describing the operator and the autonomy. In turn, these restrictions raise questions about the flexibility and applicability of the linear blending framework. Additionally, we present an extension of linear blending called "operator biased linear trajectory blending" (which formalizes some recent approaches in linear blending such as~\cite{dragan-ijrr-2013}) and show that not only is this also a restrictive special case of our probabilistic approach, but more importantly, is statistically unsound, and thus, mathematically, unsuitable for implementation. Instead, we suggest a statistically principled approach that guarantees data is used in a consistent manner, and show how this alternative approach converges to the full probabilistic framework. We conclude by proving that, in general, linear blending is suboptimal with respect to the joint metric of agreeability, safety, and efficiency