PCFP 2013 - Workshop on Progress, Challenges and Future Perspectives in Navigation and Manipulation Assistance for Robotic Wheelchairs

Research on robotic wheelchairs has been performed for over 20 years now, yet no commercially available system is currently available on the market. However, the increasing use of sensors and navigation assistance in the automotive market is likely to eliminate earlier bottlenecks for commercial robotic wheelchairs. Furthermore, with the advent of novel and powerful sensors, with the development of novel planning and statistical algorithms, and due to the ever increasing speed and memory of nowadays computers, research in this field is still very active today.
This workshop fits well in the IROS 2012 theme of robots for quality of life, and in the theme "robotic adaptation to humans adapting to robots" of the FP7 project RADHAR that co-organises this workshop (www.radhar.eu). The workshop will present recent developments, current bottlenecks and future directions in the field of navigation and manipulation assistance for robotic wheelchair users. More specifically, the workshop welcomes papers on novel human-machine interfaces, approaches and design guidelines for navigation and manipulation shared control, benchmarking and evaluation of such assistive approaches by end users, and modelling and prediction techniques of dynamic environments.
Intended audience
In the first place, we want to bring together researchers working on shared control navigation or manipulation algorithms for robotic wheelchairs. This also includes related topics such as human-machine interfacing, driver modelling, intention estimation, and estimation and prediction of the driver’s dynamic surroundings. The presented topics will also be of interest for researchers working on navigation assistance for other vehicles such as cars, agricultural vehicles or forklift trucks.
The secondary audience includes physiotherapists, wheelchair users and industry representatives who want to steer future research toward real-world challenges and who want to find out about and use the latest results in the field of robotic navigation or manipulation assistance.
Objectives
The workshop aims to address the following questions:
How to make shared control systems intuitive and trustworthy?
How to evaluate and compare shared control systems? What are good benchmark tests?
What are the bottlenecks to bring shared control systems to the market?
List of topics
Topics of the workshop will include:
Navigation and manipulation assistance algorithms, i.e. shared control for robotic wheelchairs: approaches, design guidelines, evaluation and comparison
Driver modelling and adaptation: prediction of driver signals, stress detection, estimation of focus-of-attention
Intention estimation or plan recognition
Novel human-machine interfaces: haptic joystick, brain-computer interface, voice control, eye tracking
Modelling of dynamic obstacles’ motion and socially-compliant motion planning
Environment modelling: object recognition, traversability estimation, estimation of surface characteristics
Bringing assistive robots to the market: legal and ethical issues, key enablers and major roadblocks
User tests and benchmark experiments
Survey papers.