Design of Interaction for simply operating smart electric wheelchair in Intelligent Space

This paper presents interaction between a user and a smart electric wheelchair. We propose a personal mobility tool (PMT) which integrates autonomous mobile robot navigation technology with intuitive and cognitive interaction between a user and a smart wheelchair. An intuitive and noncontinuous input method to enable a user to specify a direction in which he/she wants to go is proposed. Using an acceleration sensor and a pressure sensor, a user gives direction to the PMT. Then, the PMT determines a goal position in an environmental map based on the direction. Also, to help a user interpret robot behaviors, an output interface to realize informative communication between a user and the PMT is described. In this paper, we present an improved vibrotactile interface to provide environmental information from a smart wheelchair to the user. We conducted experiments to evaluate users' performance using the output vibrotactile interface. In the experiments, users tried to detect distance and angle toward obstacles based on vibration stimuli. Through the experiments, we could confirm that the improved vibrotactile interface could improve users' performance well.