Smart wheelchairs: A literature review.

Evaluation of the Hephaestus Smart Wheelchair System

Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire, craftsmen and smiths was the only Olympian with a disability. Hephaestus was injured when his father, Zeus, flung him off Mount Olympus for siding against Zeus in a dispute with Hephaestus' mother, Hera. To compensate for his disability Hephaestus built two robots, one silver and one gold, to transport him. The Hephaestus Smart Wheelchair System is envisioned ...

The smart wheelchair component system.

While the needs of many individuals with disabilities can be satisfied with power wheelchairs, some members of the disabled community find it difficult or impossible to operate a standard power wheelchair. To accommodate this population, several researchers have used technologies originally developed for mobile robots to create "smart wheelchairs" that reduce the physical, perceptual, and cogni...

Chapter 2: Literature Review History of Wheelchairs and Power Add-On Units

On the Feasibility of Using a Standardized Test for Evaluating a Speech-Controlled Smart Wheelchair

Many people who have to rely on powered wheelchairs find it hard to fulfill daily navigation tasks with their chairs. The SmartWheeler project aims at developing an intelligent wheelchair that minimizes the physical and cognitive load required in steering it. In this paper we briefly outline the SmartWheeler project and its goals. We then argue that it is important to have a standardized test t...

Towards Provably Safe Control for Smart Wheelchairs

We propose verification techniques from hybrid control theory to address safety issues in the indoor operation of powered wheelchairs. Verification through hybrid system reachability can provide a mathematical guarantee of safety, where safety is defined as the ability of the system to remain within a desired subset of the state-space. Current efforts are in developing a general algorithm for v...