Semantic topological map-based smart wheelchair navigation system for low throughput interface

Abstract

This paper presents a newnavigation system designed for the smartwheelchair, which interacts with a human user using a low throughput interface. Through the low throughput interface, the user can only give a very limited number of command types with a low frequency, meaning that a low throughput interface requests the user to domore steps, taking a longer time, just to select the desired goal. In order to decrease the number of operations requested to the user, our navigation system is designed to refine the alternative targets by selecting the significant targets and organize them in a binary tree for reducing user’s operation. We also introduce a user-friendly visual feedback to display to the user in order to show the current state and the prompt commands to the user, too. This navigation system is successfully tested in a real environment.