User evaluation of a collaborative wheelchair 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 constrains the wheelchair to follow a software defined guide path. This paper presents an evaluation of the CWA system, consisting of experiments performed with human subjects including three people with cerebral palsy (CP) and two with traumatic brain injury (TBI). We investigate the performance of the system in terms of its interaction with human subjects and motion efficiency and compare to that of able-bodied subjects, who have previously performed the same evaluation. The results suggest that the CWA brings safe motion and drastically simplifies the control without compromising the navigation performance.