R-square criteria, the number of necessary clusters
to achieve 80% of the total variability retain by the
clusters is 12. Since the sample of volunteers was
from the same population, this kind of conclusions
are very natural. So the next step will consist in
obtain information about handicapped people. In
fact, if the clusters of subjects could be defined then
it should be interesting to work with supervised
classification in which the best command mode
would be the class.
6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
Although many Intelligent Wheelchair prototypes
are being developed in several research projects
around the world, the adaptation of user interfaces to
each specific patient is an often neglected research
topic. Typically, the interfaces are very rigid and
adapted to a single user or user group. Intellwheels
project is aiming at developing a new concept of
Intelligent Wheelchair controlled using high-level
commands processed by a multimodal interface.
However, in order to fully control the wheelchair,
users must have a wheelchair interface adapted to
their characteristics. In order to collect the
characteristics of individuals it is important to have
variables that can produce a user profile. The first
stage must be a statistical analysis to extract
knowledge of user and the surrounding. The second
stage must be a supervised classification to use
Machine Learning algorithms in order to construct a
model for automatic classification of new cases.
This paper mainly refers to the proposal of a set of
tasks for extracting the required information for
generating user profiles. A preliminary study has
been done with several voluntaries, enabling to test
the proposed methodology before going to the field
and acquiring information with disabled individuals.
In fact, this will be the next step for future work. The
test set presented in this paper will be tested by a
group of disabled individuals, and the results of both
experiments will be compared to check if the
performances of both populations are similar. Also,
in order to collect feedback regarding the system
usability, disabled users will be invited to drive the
wheelchair in a number of real and simulated
scenarios.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to acknowledge to
FCT – Portuguese Science and Technology
Foundation for the INTELLWHEELS project
funding (RIPD/ADA/109636/2009), for the PhD
Scholarship FCT/SFRH/BD/44541/2008, LIACC –
Laboratório de Inteligência Artificial e de
Computadores, DETI/UA – Dep. Electrónica,
Telecomunicações e Informática and ESTSP/IPP –
Escola Superior de Tecnologia da Saúde Porto –
IPP.
REFERENCES
Adachi, Y., Kuno, Y., Shimada, N., Shirai, N., 1998.
Intelligent wheelchair using visual information on
human faces. In International Conference in Intelligent
Robots and Systems, vol. 1, pp. 354-359.
Bell, D. A., Borenstein, J., Levine, S. P., Koren, Y.; Jaros,
J., 1994. An assistive navigation system for
wheelchairs based upon mobile robot obstacle
avoidance. In IEEE Conf. on Robotics and
Automation, pp. 2018-2022.
Borgerding, B., Ivlev, O., Martens, C., Ruchel, N., Gräser,
A., 1999. FRIEND: Functional robot arm with user
friendly interface for disabled people. In 5th European
Conf. for the Ad-vancement of Assistive Technology.
Braga, R., Petry, M., Moreira, A.P., Reis, L.P., 2009.
Concept and Design of the Intellwheels Platform for
Developing Intelligent Wheelchairs. In LNEE/
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, vol.
37, pp. 191-203.
Cypher, A., Halbert, D. C., 1994. Watch what I do:
programming by demonstration. A. Cypher and D. C.
Halbert, Eds. Massachusetts, USA: Library of
Congress.
Faria, P.M., Braga, R., Valgôde, E., Reis, L.P., 2007.
Interface framework to drive an intelligent wheelchair
using facial expressions. In IEEE International
Symposium on Industrial Electronics, Vigo, pp. 1791-
1796.
Gao, C., Hoffman, I., Miller, T., Panzarella, T., Spletzer,
J., 2008. Performance Characterization of LIDAR
Based Localization for Docking a Smart Wheelchair
System. In Internationsl Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems, San Diego.
Hamagami, T., Hirata, H., 2004. Development of
Intelligent Wheelchair acquiring autonomous,
cooperative and collaborative behaviour. In IEEE
International Conference on Systems Man and
Cybernetics, vol. 4, pp. 3525-3530.
Horn, O., Kreutner, M., 2009. Smart wheelchair
perception using odometry, ultrasound sensors and
camera. Robotica, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 303-310, March.
Hoyer, H., Hölper, R., 1993. Open control architecture for
an intelligent omnidirectional wheelchair. In Proc.1st
TIDE Congress, Brussels, pp. 93-97.
Jia, P., Hu, H., Lu, T., Yuan, K., 2007. Head Gesture
Recognition for Hands-free Control of an Intelligent
ICAART 2012 - International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence
178