Robot wheelchair finds its own way
MIT researchers are developing a wheelchair that can find its way in a given building and give response to verbal command.
The researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Instutute of Technology) are developing a new kind of autonomous wheelchair that can learn all about the locations in a given building and then take its occupant to a given place in response to a verbal command.
Just by saying "take me to the cafeteria" or "go to my room," the wheelchair user would be able to avoid the need for controlling every twist and turn of the route and could simply sit back and relax as the chair moves from one place to another based on a map stored in its memory.
"It's a system that can learn and adapt to the user," says Nicholas Roy, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics and co-developer of the wheelchair. "People have different preferences and different ways of referring to places and objects", he says, and the aim is to have each wheelchair personalized for its user and the user's environment.
The MIT system can learn about its environment in much the same way as a person would: by being taken around once on a guided tour, with important places identified along the way. For example, as the wheelchair is pushed around a nursing home for the first time, the patient or a caregiver would say: "this is my room" or "here we are in the foyer" or "nurse's station."
Outdoors in the open, such systems can rely on GPS receivers to figure out where they are, but inside buildings that method usually doesn't work, so other approaches are needed. For now, the wheelchair prototype relies on a WiFi system to make its maps and then navigate through them, which requires setting up a network of WiFi nodes around the facility in advance. After months of preliminary tests on campus, they have begun trials in a real nursing home environment with real patients, at the Boston Home in Dorchester, a facility where all of the patients use wheelchairs.
As the research progresses the researchers are hoping for a collision-avoidance system using detectors to prevent the chair from bumping into other wheelchairs, walls or other obstacles. In addition they hope to add mechanical arms to the chairs, to aid the patients further by picking up and manipulating objects - everything from flipping a light switch to picking up a cup and bringing it to the person's lips.
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