A semi-autonomous framework for human-aware and user intention driven wheelchair mobility assistance

An important aspect to be taken care of while designing assistive robots for mobility is that they need to operate among humans. Thus understanding human spatial social conventions and incorporating them in the assistive solutions, is important. In this paper, we introduce a semi-autonomous framework for assistive wheelchair navigation in human environments, which is driven by the intention of the wheelchair user. Safe and socially compliant motion provided by a user intention driven local motion planner is fused with user teleoperation in order to create such a system. Taking into account the fact that the user is the primary controller, our proposed system aims to provide progressive assistance whenever the user is in danger of collision or at risk of disturbance to other humans. We also thus propose generalized formulations for estimating user intentions and for sharing control within the context of wheelchair mobility assistance, that is adaptable in order to be deployed in real world systems. We then evaluate the proposed framework in simulation in order to obtain a quantitative analysis. We also provide experimental evidence using an off-the-shelf robotized wheelchair equipped with a single 2D laser scanner.