The Intelligent Wheelchair

Vulcan, the Intelligent Wheelchair at the University of Texas at Austin.

We have built a second-generation robotic wheelchair at the University of Michigan, named Vulcan 2 (picture soon). We are also collaborating with the Toyota Technical Center in Ann Arbor on a third robotic wheelchair.

Papers

• Jong Jin Park and Benjamin Kuipers. 2011.
  A smooth control law for graceful motion of differential wheeled mobile robots in 2D environments.
  IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-11).

• S. Gulati, C. Jhurani, B. Kuipers and R. Longoria. 2009.
  A framework for planning comfortable and customizable motion of an assistive mobile robot.
  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS-09).

• A. Murarka and B. Kuipers. 2009. A stereo vision based mapping algorithm for detecting inclines, drop-offs, and obstacles for safe local navigation.
  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS-09).

• Patrick Beeson, Joseph Modayil, Benjamin Kuipers.
  Factoring the mapping problem: Mobile robot map-building in the Hybrid Spatial Semantic Hierarchy
  International Journal of Robotics Research 29(4): 428-459, 2010.

• A. Murarka, M. Sridharan and B. Kuipers. 2008. Detecting obstacles and drop-offs using stereo and motion cues for safe local motion.
  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS-08).

• Shilpa Gulati and Benjamin Kuipers. 2008.
  High Performance Control for Graceful Motion of an Intelligent Wheelchair.
  Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

• Patrick Beeson, Matt MacMahon, Joseph Modayil, Aniket Murarka, Benjamin Kuipers and Brian Stankiewicz. 2007.
  Integrating multiple representations of spatial knowledge for mapping, navigation, and communication.
  In Interaction Challenges for Intelligent Assistants, AAAI Spring Symposium Series, Stanford, CA.

• Aniket Murarka, Joseph Modayil, and Benjamin Kuipers. 2006.
  Building local safety maps for a wheelchair robot using vision and lasers.
  Canadian Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV-06).

• W. S. Gribble, R. L. Browning, M. Hewett, E. Remolina and B. J. Kuipers. 1998. Integrating vision and spatial reasoning for assistive navigation.
  In V. Mittal, H. Yanco, J. Aronis and R. Simpson (Eds.), Assistive Technology and Artificial Intelligence, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag, New York, 1998.

Survey Articles

• R. C. Simpson, E. F. LoPresti and R. A. Cooper. How many people would benefit from a smart wheelchair? Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development 45(1): 53-72, 2008.

• R. C. Simpson. Smart wheelchairs: a literature review. Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development 42(4): 423-436, 2005.

Resources