Touchless Shared-Control for Wheelchair Navigation

We present a touchless shared-control approach merging wearable sensor-based control and autonomous safety control for wheelchair navigation in this study. To assist disabled people who have no or limited sensorimotor control with their fingers, a wearable armband sensor is used to control an electric wheelchair. Laser rangefinder based autonomous safety control of obstacle avoidance is also implemented through the learning from demonstration. The shared-control architecture for the wheelchair navigation is built up on the integration of the armband-based human control and autonomous safety control. A customized arbitration function was developed to make smooth transition of two control systems according to user’s preference and satisfaction. Our experiments demonstrate that the touchless shared-control can be applied for wheelchair navigation in the real world.