Integrating Vision and Spatial Reasoning for Assistive Navigation

This paper describes the goals and research directions of the University of Texas Artiicial Intelligence Lab's Intelligent Wheelchair Project (IWP). The IWP is a work in progress. The authors are part of a collab-orative eeort to bring expertise from knowledge representation , control, planning, and machine vision to bear on this diicult and interesting problem domain. Our strategy uses knowledge about the semantic structure of space to focus processing power and sensing resources. The semi-autonomous assistive control of a wheelchair shares many subproblems with mobile robotics, including those of sensor interpretation, spatial knowledge representation, and real-time control. By enabling the wheelchair with active vision and other sensing modes, and by application of our theories of spatial knowledge representation and reasoning, we hope to provide substantial assistance to people with severe mobility impairments.