Driving Control of a Powered Wheelchair Considering Uncertainty of Gaze Input in an Unknown Environment

This paper describes the motion control system for a powered wheelchair using eye gaze in an unknown environment. Recently, new Human-Computer Interfaces (HCIs) that have replaced joysticks have been developed for a person with a disability of the upper body. In this paper, movement of the eyes is used as an HCI. The wheelchair control system proposed in this study aims to achieve an operation such that a passenger gazes towards the direction he or she wants to move in the unknown environment. Implementation of such an operating method facilitates easy and accurate movement of the wheelchair even in complicated environments comprising passages on the same side. This paper presents a system based on gaze detection and environment recognition that are integrated by the fuzzy set theory in real time. In the fuzzy set theory, we achieve the movement to the passage which a passenger gazes towards among some passages by integrating the information of some passages and gaze. Moreover, we design it with consideration of uncertain gaze input by using the value of gaze detection accuracy. Moreover, we achieve obstacle avoidance by integrating the information of obstacles. This motion control system can support safe and smooth movement of the wheelchair by automatically calculating its direction of motion and velocity, to avoid obstacles and move in the gaze direction of the passenger. The effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated through experiments in a real environment.