Identification of wheelchair user steering behaviour within indoor environments

Abstract

The wide acceptance of wheelchairs in the society may be associated to their simplicity, and to the important mobility ease they provide to people with disability. Nonetheless, users with extreme mobility impairments still experience some cognitive and physical steering challenges that limit their capacity to navigate even simple environments. Assistive wheelchairs with functionalities to enable customisation of user handicap are therefore still required. The diversity of user disabilities and needs, and the corresponding assistive measures, necessitate proper understanding of the user. Modelling and integration of user driving behaviour into the control loop in order to monitor user inputs, and execute necessary corrective steps in troublesome situations, may just be one way of providing the assistance that corresponds to needs of the user. This paper attempts to identify the steering behaviour of an individual wheelchair user in a normal living room environment. The preliminary navigation experiments required to obtain the steering data are performed in a virtual world on an augmented wheelchair platform, and the participant is observed to exhibit expected navigational behaviours. Least square method is considered in the estimation of model parameters for the non-linear steering model with interesting regression analysis outcome.