Apr 14
While the promise of self-driving cars may be mere years away, those people who have a powered wheelchair to get around town hopefully won’t have to wait much longer before their chairs can do the work for them as well.
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University are using robotics to build smarter wheelchairs – wheelchairs that still respond to human commands, but won’t go rolling off of a cliff by themselves even if the human operator holds down the accelerator and the on-board camera sees there’s a hazard ahead.
The goal is to make wheelchairs safer even if the human operator is incapacitated or the controls malfunction. Researchers hope to program powered wheelchairs with rudimentary artificial intelligence so they know the difference between real and reasonable human control commands and nonsensical ones that are at best silly and at worst harmful for the driver.
The wheelchairs can be controlled via conventional joystick, or even XBox controller. You can see a video of one of the chairs in action behind the jump.
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