For someone with advanced Lou Gehrig’s disease or severe paralysis, a motorized wheelchair can be very hard to use: If you can’t move a joystick with your hand, you have to use a switch embedded in the headset or a “sip-and-puff” device controlled with the breath.

The devices only allow you to control one thing at a time: You can adjust your speed or the direction that your wheelchair is pointing, but not both simultaneously.

[Photo: argallab]

“This basically makes it so the operation of the wheelchair is much more challenging, especially when you’re dealing with tightly constrained spaces,” says Brenna Argall, a professor at Northwestern University who is developing technology for autonomous wheelchairs in her Assistive and Rehabilitation Robotics Laboratory. “What this means, in practice, is that for many people it’s a burden or very fatiguing mentally and physically to operate the wheelchair,” she tells Co.Exist.

And there’s the fact that some people don’t have enough motor control to be prescribed a wheelchair. Children who can’t easily use a wheelchair, similarly, may not be allowed to bring it to school.

Autonomy can change that by outfitting wheelchairs with sensors to avoid obstacles in much the same way a self-driving car does. Several researchers are working on variations of the wheelchair-adapted technology. At Oregon State University, a team is developing a low-cost kit that could be added to existing wheelchairs. At MIT, a team is developing a self-driving wheelchair that could be used in nursing homes or hospitals.

[Photo: C. Jason Brown]

“There is a lot we can borrow from the field of autonomous robots and what mobile robots have been able to do on their own for decades now,” Argall says.