A hierarchical design for shared-control wheelchair navigation in dynamic environments

For people who have a mobility impairment and find standard wheelchairs unsuitable, a shared-controlled approach could provide a potential mobility solution. However, state-of-the-art research on shared control wheelchairs mainly focus on static environments. In this paper, we present a hierarchical design for our shared-controlled wheelchair using a velocity-based approach together with probabilistic shared control (PSC). By modifying the collision avoidance element and model the robot-pedestrian interaction based on their physical distance, we extended the implementation of PSC to dynamic environments. Our approach was tested in a Unity3D based simulator with human participants. It achieved least number of collisions while obtaining relatively low computational cost and high user agreement comparing with other state-of-the-art methods.