Abstract
This paper describes the goals and research directions of the University of Texas Artificial Intelligence Lab's Intelligent Wheelchair Project (IWP). The IWP is a work in progress. The authors are part of a collaborative effort to bring expertise from knowledge representation, control, planning, and machine vision to bear on this difficult and interesting problem domain. Our strategy uses knowledge about the semantic structure of space to focus processing power and sensing resources. The semi-autonomous assistive control of a wheelchair shares many sub-problems with mobile robotics, including those of sensor interpretation, spatial knowledge representation, and real-time control. By enabling the wheelchair with active vision and other sensing modes, and by application of our theories of spatial knowledge representation and reasoning, we hope to provide substantial assistance to people with severe mobility impairments.
This work has taken place in the Qualitative Reasoning Group at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, The University of Texas at Austin. Research of the Qualitative Reasoning Group is supported in part by NSF grants IRI-9504138 and CDA 9617327, by NASA grant NAG 9-898, and by the Texas Advanced Research Program under grants no. 003658-242 and 003658-347.
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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Gribble, W.S., Browning, R.L., Hewett, M., Remolina, E., Kuipers, B.J. (1998). Integrating vision and spatial reasoning for assistive navigation. In: Mittal, V.O., Yanco, H.A., Aronis, J., Simpson, R. (eds) Assistive Technology and Artificial Intelligence. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1458. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0055978
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0055978
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