Automatic adaptation in the NavChair Assistive Wheelchair Navigation System

The NavChair Assistive Wheelchair Navigation System is an adaptive shared control system being developed to provide mobility to those individuals who would otherwise find it difficult or impossible to use a power wheelchair due to cognitive, perceptual, or motor impairments. The NavChair provides task-specific navigation assistance to the wheelchair operator in the form of several distinct operating modes, each of which distributes control differently between the wheelchair and the operator. This paper describes the NavChair's mechanism for automatically selecting the most appropriate operating mode based on a combination of the wheelchair's immediate situation and its global location. Results from two experimental evaluations of the adaptation method are presented.