If anything, the system is probably overly cautious at this point, stopping any time someone passes in its periphery. The process took around 10 to 15 seconds.
#DRIVERS JOYSTICK TECH MOBILITY REVIEW FULL#
When the system detects a person, it slowly comes to a full stop, readjusts its position and drives around the person in its way. The ride is slow and smooth - as you’d hope from an electric wheelchair. The birds-eye view of the room isn’t exactly complex, but it does the trick. The walls are a solid black, and feet show up as small multi-colored dots. Once traced, the path is visible as a color line on a large tablet mounted on one of the arm rests.
It’s nothing too exciting - just a straight shot from one side of the building to the other. First, they map the path, using a joystick and the 3D mapping tech up top.
A smaller scanner up front, meanwhile, detects obstacles in its way.īalch and MIT research assistant Felix Naser offer me a quick ride around the Stata lobby on the wheelchair - not exactly the campus tour I was expecting. That system, mounted on top of the wheelchair, creates a 3D map of the fixed points around it - in this case, the irregularly-spaced walls of the Frank Geary-designed Stata Center. The chair feature the same LIDAR scanners the school is using on their full-sized cars, along with a mapping technology CSAIL developed way back in 2010 for use on the streets of Singapore, long before autonomy became the buzz word it is today. “A lot of the research I’ve seen people doing since I’ve been has been focused on helping people with disabilities deal with things more easily.”
#DRIVERS JOYSTICK TECH MOBILITY REVIEW SOFTWARE#
“The current research that’s being done is using it more as a platform, but there are people who are discussing doing research specifically on the chair,” says Thomas Balch, an MIT robotics software engineer. The fact that the product could have real world applications for people with mobility issues is something of a happy coincidence. The wheelchair serves as a good middle ground between real and remote control cars, letting researchers iterate more quickly on their ideas. Nearby military bases have popped up on the list of possible locations, but in the meantime, the school needed ways to try out their ideas before scaling them up to two ton pieces of rolling metal.
It turns out there’s a lot of red tape involved when it comes to trying out driverless technology in the real world - particularly in a densely populated city like Boston. It’s hard to test autonomous cars in out on the streets. This kind of real world testing is exactly why the chair exists in the first place. As students wander by in groups, deep in conversation or face down in their smartphones, their paths are unpredictable and collisions are a very real possibility. It’s a nice little rolling advertisement for the lab’s work - and more importantly, it’s a great opportunity to test the mobility device in a real world setting. Over the past few months, CSAIL’s (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) self-driving wheelchair has become a familiar sight around the MIT halls.
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