Analysis of Socially Acceptable Smart Wheelchair Navigation Based on Head Cue Information

Smart wheelchair can be defined as a standard power electrical wheelchair that equipped with a mobile robotic technology to assist the user in a number of situations. Most of the smart wheelchair work focusing on safety issue and less work considers a socially acceptable issue. Since wheelchairs are normally used in human-shared environment, it is important to ensure the assistive motion generated from the wheelchair is safe and comfortable to the human in the surrounding. Here the framework for catering such an issue is proposed. The system initially infers human's state from head cue information. Next, the information is interpreted for modeling human's comfort zone (CZ) based on rules rooted from Proxemics concept. Finally, the wheelchair's motion is generated by avoiding both, the CZ and the in place obstacle. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework