Understanding Approaching Behavior for a Wheelchair with a Robotic Arm: A Human Study for Improving Autonomous Navigation

An intelligent wheelchair is a system that evolves its functions for the well-being of humankind in the present status of robotics. Due to the active evolution of these wheelchair systems wheelchair-mounted robotic arms can be caught as the next level of development. However, the current state of intelligence is far behind the expansion and this lack causes to add extra cognitive load on handicapped users. Most of the available hindrances to autonomous operation could certainly be achieved by replicating natural human behaviors. Under these circumstances understanding human cognition on positioning a wheelchair around a table will drastically ease the autonomous object manipulation tasks by these systems. Hence to understand natural human behavior, a human study with three sub-studies was designed and reveal the prominent factors behind human cognition. Results were analyzed statistically to identify the significance of the considered factors. In lite of the study, approaching and positioning of the wheelchair mainly depend on the object position, obstacle position, and obstacles configuration within the considered workspace. Further orientation mainly depends on the object's position and approaching direction. Besides, these outcomes would be extremely beneficial in synthesizing human cognition to build human-friendly mobile robots for uplifting users' lives as well.