Robotic wheelchair moving with multiple companions

We have been conducting research on ways to contribute to reducing the workload of caregivers. We developed a wheelchair capable of following a single accompanying caregiver in a parallel position. However, observations in actual care facilities revealed that people often move as a group: for instance, two caregivers each pushed a wheelchair together. Therefore, we now aim to develop a robotic wheelchair system that allows multiple wheelchairs and accompanying caregivers to coordinate their movement together. However, such a situation necessitates a complex system. Making such a system practical represents an enormous challenge. Therefore, as a first step we decided to break down this complex “multiple-multiple” situation by isolating particular instances with multiple wheelchairs and/or multiple caregivers. In this paper, we focus on the “single-multiple” situation; i.e., a situation where a single wheelchair user is accompanied by multiple accompanies. We propose a robotic wheelchair system that facilitates coordinated movement between the wheelchair and the caregivers. In other words, the wheelchair system will track multiple people in the vicinity using GPGPU, and distinguish the accompanying caregivers from among other passersby based on the trajectory of the individuals' movement.