In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in designing social robots to interact with people to provide therapy and companionship. Most social robots currently being used are light-weight and much smaller in size compared to people. In this work, we investigate designing interactions for larger and more physically capable robots as they have more potential to assist people physical...

This paper introduces a new formal approach to find potential mode confusion situations in shared-control systems such as service and rehabilitation robots. So far, this subject is primarily discussed in the avionics domain. Here, it is motivated why these experiences should be transferred into the service robotics community and how it could be done. The cooperative obstacle avoidance module of...

An advanced class of robots and intelligent machines that adapt, extend, and work in a symbiotic way with humans, is required and is under research in University and Industry laboratories. These robots do not only work for humans, but also they work with or assist humans, and share with the users the same environment. This paper presents an hybrid control architecture with reactive, deliberativ...

An hybrid control architecture with reactive, deliberative, and cognitive components appropriate to human-oriented mobile robots is presented. The paper presents globally our control architecture and describes some of its modules in detail: local mapbuilding module, reactive control module and wheel ́s velocity controller. Some discussion is made concerning trajectory planning and path-tracking ...

The NavChair assistive navigation system is being developed to increase the mobility of severely handicapped individuals by providing navigation assistance for a power wheelchair. During the course of developing NavChair, advances have not only been made in the technology of "smart wheelchairs," but in other areas as well. Work on the NavChair has prompted the development of an obstacle avoidan...

This paper describes a technique of adaptive state{space partitioning for mobile robot navigation. Following this approach, the controller of a wheelchair robot adaptively discretises its state{space and learns which partitions are connected and which are not. Due to the wheelchair's kinematic restrictions, the occuring problems diier from those of holo-nomic research robots. Several successful...

Many elderly and disabled people today experience difficulties when manoeuvring an electric wheelchair. In order to help these people, several heuristic navigation algorithms have been devised in the past. However, in order to make the chair fast and reactive, the wheelchair’s dimensions, non-holonomic and dynamic constraints are often only approximately taken into account. Consequently, these ...

The electric wheelchair for handicapped is used to improve the displacement of disabled persons. An automatic navigation system is needed to ensure greater autonomy and security for the disabled person. Automatic control system is added to a manual control for autonomous displacement. Initial system composed of two DC motors installed at the rear of used electric wheelchair, power module for th...

Computer Vision has been a very new field developing rapidly in recent years. One of the main advantages in this development is that the “human vision” abilities such as electronically perceiving and understanding of images are provided to apply to autonomous vehicles or mobile robots. In this paper, detection of obstacle and freespace in an autonomous wheelchair using a stereoscopic camera sys...