CoNav Chair: Development and Evaluation of a Shared Control based Wheelchair for the Built Environment

2025-07-15

AI Summary

Existing electric wheelchairs suffer from limited maneuverability in confined spaces, while fully autonomous or purely manual control modes struggle to simultaneously ensure safety and user trust. To address this, we propose CoNav Chair, a ROS-based intelligent wheelchair featuring a novel shared-control navigation framework that integrates real-time obstacle perception, dynamic path planning, and human–machine intent understanding. The framework enables seamless transitions among manual, shared, and fully autonomous modes, dynamically balancing human control authority and system autonomy to optimize the trade-off among collision avoidance, path efficiency, and user trust. In a user study with 21 healthy participants, the shared mode achieved the lowest collision rate, significantly reduced task completion time and trajectory length compared to manual control, matched the motion smoothness of full autonomy, and received the highest subjective ratings for safety and usability.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction
• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Model-Based Reasoning

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

As the global population of people with disabilities (PWD) continues to grow, so will the need for mobility solutions that promote independent living and social integration. Wheelchairs are vital for the mobility of PWD in both indoor and outdoor environments. The current SOTA in powered wheelchairs is based on either manually controlled or fully autonomous modes of operation, offering limited flexibility and often proving difficult to navigate in spatially constrained environments. Moreover, research on robotic wheelchairs has focused predominantly on complete autonomy or improved manual control; approaches that can compromise efficiency and user trust. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces the CoNav Chair, a smart wheelchair based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) and featuring shared control navigation and obstacle avoidance capabilities that are intended to enhance navigational efficiency, safety, and ease of use for the user. The paper outlines the CoNav Chair's design and presents a preliminary usability evaluation comparing three distinct navigation modes, namely, manual, shared, and fully autonomous, conducted with 21 healthy, unimpaired participants traversing an indoor building environment. Study findings indicated that the shared control navigation framework had significantly fewer collisions and performed comparably, if not superior to the autonomous and manual modes, on task completion time, trajectory length, and smoothness; and was perceived as being safer and more efficient based on user reported subjective assessments of usability. Overall, the CoNav system demonstrated acceptable safety and performance, laying the foundation for subsequent usability testing with end users, namely, PWDs who rely on a powered wheelchair for mobility.

Problem

• Develop shared-control wheelchair for better navigation flexibility
• Improve safety and efficiency in constrained environments
• Compare manual, shared, autonomous modes for usability

Innovation

• Shared control navigation for wheelchairs
• ROS-based obstacle avoidance system
• Hybrid manual-autonomous operation modes