Evaluation of the Collaborative Wheelchair Assistant System

The collaborative wheelchair assistant (CWA) is a robotic wheelchair which makes full use of human skills, by involving the user into the navigation control. The user gives the high-level commands and directly controls the speed, while the low-level control is taken over by the machine, which is tracking a software defined guide path. This paper presents an evaluation of the CWA system, consisting of experiments performed with human subjects. We investigated the performance of the system in terms of its interaction with healthy subjects and motion efficiency. Initial experiments with a cerebral palsy subject were also performed. The results show that path guidance brings safe motion and drastically simplifies the control. The wheelchair user adopts a driving behavior which is optimal from the first trial and requires little intervention.