Navigation skills based profiling for collaborative wheelchair control

Abstract

This work presents a new approach to proactive collaborative wheelchair control. The system is based on estimating how much help the person needs at each situation and providing just the correct amount. This is achieved by combining robot and human control commands in a reactive fashion after weighting them by their respective local efficiency. Thus, the better the person drives, the more control he/she is awarded with. In order to predict how much help users may need in advance rather than waiting for them to decrease in efficiency, their skills to deal with each situation are estimated with respect to a baseline driver profile to increase assistance when needed. Situations are characterized at reactive level to keep a reduced set. This profile has been extracted from real traces of more than 70 inpatients presenting different physical and cognitive skills via clustering. The approach has been successfully tested at Fondazione Santa Lucia (FSL) in Rome.