A demonstration of a conversationally guided smart wheelchair

  • Authors:
  • Beth A. Hockey;David P. Miller

  • Affiliations:
  • UC Santa Cruz;University of Oklahoma

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 9th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

There is a substantial population of wheelchair users who do not have the motor capabilities needed to efficiently operate a power wheelchair on their own. Various interfaces have been devised including some simple voice controlled chairs that can understand simple commands. However, such systems are awkward and slow to use. This demonstration shows operation of a smart wheelchair through a spoken conversational interface. By using a more capable dialogue, rather than a simple command paradigm, the chair can leverage off of the user's perceptual capabilities in order to process natural, high-level commands such as take me to the desk, which initiates a conversation with the chair to determine which desk and -if it is not immediately detected by the chair's sensors - where the desk is located.