Abstract
New-generation, intelligent, powered wheelchairs promise to increase the mobility and freedom of individuals with serious chronic mobility impairments. And while rapid progress continues to be made in terms of the engineering capabilities of robotic wheelchairs, many projects fall short of the target in terms of ease of use, conviviality, and robustness. This paper describes the SmartWheeler, a multifunctional intelligent wheelchair, which leverages state-of-the-art probabilistic techniques for both autonomous navigation and user interaction modeling, to provide a novel robust solution to the problem of assistive mobility. We also discuss the use of standardized evaluation in the development and testing of such technology.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Fehr, L., Langbein, E., Skaar, S.B.: Adequacy of power wheelchair control interfaces for persons with severe disabilities: A clinical survey. J. of Rehabilitation Research & Development 37, 353–360 (2000)
Simpson, R.C., LoPresti, E.F., Cooper, R.A.: How many people would benefit from a smart wheelchair? J. of Rehabilitation Research & Development 45, 53–72 (2008)
Simpson, R.C.: Smart wheelchairs: A literature review. J. of Rehabilitation Research & Development 42, 423–436 (2005)
Routhier, F., Vincent, C., Desrosiers, J., Nadeau, S., Guerette, C.: Development of an obstacle course assessment of wheelchair user performance (OCAWUP). Technology & Disability 16, 19–31 (2004)
Thrun, S., Burgard, W., Fox, D.: Probabilistic Robotics. MIT Press, Cambridge (2005)
Collett, T.H.J., MacDonald, B.A., Gerkey, B.P.: Player 2.0: Toward a practical robot programming framework. In: Proceedings of the Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (2005)
Montemerlo, M., Roy, N., Thrun, S.: Perspectives on standarization in mobile robot programming: The Carnegie Mellon Navigation (CARMEN) Toolkit. In: International Conference on Robotics and Systems, pp. 2436–2441 (2003)
Kaelbling, L.P., Littman, M.L., Cassandra, A.R.: Planning and acting in partially observable stochastic domains. Artificial Intelligence 101(1-2), 99–134 (1998)
Sondik, E.J.: The optimal control of partially observable Markov processes. PhD thesis, Stanford University (1971)
Pineau, J., Gordon, G., Thrun, S.: Anytime point-based approximations for large POMDPs. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 27, 335–380 (2006)
Kaplow, R., Atrash, A., Pineau, J.: Variable resolution decomposition for robotic navigation under a POMDP framework. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (2010)
Guez, A., Pineau, J.: Multi-tasking SLAM. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA (2010)
White, M.: Open ccg: The open nlp ccg library. Software (2001), http://openccg.sourceforge.net
Atrash, A., Pineau, J.: A bayesian reinforcement learning approach for customizing human-robot interfaces. In: International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) (2009)
Atrash, A., Kaplow, R., Villemure, J., West, R., Yamani, H., Pineau, J.: Towards the deployment of an intelligent wheelchair in a standardized rehabilitation environment. Interaction Studies (2009)
Honoré, W., Atrash, A., Boucher, P., Kaplow, R., Kalouwani, S., Nguyen, H., Villemure, J., West, R., Routhier, F., Stone, P., Dufour, C., Dussault, J.-P., Rock, D., Cohen, P., Demers, L., Forget, R., Pineau, J.: Human-oriented design and initial validation of an intelligent powered wheelchair. In: RESNA Annual Conference (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pineau, J., Atrash, A., Kaplow, R., Villemure, J. (2010). On the Design and Validation of an Intelligent Powered Wheelchair: Lessons from the SmartWheeler Project. In: Angeles, J., Boulet, B., Clark, J.J., Kövecses, J., Siddiqi, K. (eds) Brain, Body and Machine. Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing, vol 83. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16259-6_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16259-6_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-16258-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-16259-6
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)