Robotic wheelchair looking at all people

ABSTRACT

Although several robotic/intelligent wheelchairs have been proposed recently,they consider friendliness only to their users. Machines like wheelchairs interact various people other than their users. They must consider friendliness to all these people. This paper presents a robotic wheelchair that cares for all relevant people: users, pedestrians, and caregivers, by looking at these people. It looks at the user's face, observing its direction. The user can turn it by looking in his/her desired direction. It looks at pedestrians and changes the way of avoidance against them depending on whether or not their noticing it. In addition, it looks at the caregiver when he/she is with it and keeps moving with him/her.

REFERENCES

• 1: Takashi Gomi , Ann Griffith, Developing Intelligent Wheelchairs for the Handicapped, Assistive Technology and Artificial Intelligence, Applications in Robotics, User Interfaces and Natural Language Processing, p.150-178, January 1998
• 2: Yoshinori Kuno , Tomoyuki Ishiyama , Satoru Nakanishi , Yoshiaki Shirai, Combining observations of intentional and unintentional behaviors for human-computer interaction, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: the CHI is the limit, p.238-245, May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/302979.303051]
• 3: Miller, D.P., and Slack, M.G. Design and testing of a low-cost robotic wheelchair prototype. Autonomous Robotics 2 (1995),77-88.
• 4: Nakanishi, S., Kuno, Y., Shimada, N., and Shirai, Y. Robotic wheelchair based on observations of both user and environment, in Proceedings 1999 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (Kyongju, Korea, Oct. 1999), 912-917.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.4 IMAGE PROCESSING AND COMPUTER VISION
      I.4.9 Applications

Keywords:
collision avoidance, face direction, intention understanding, vision-based interface, wheelchair