Chair takes command

An autonomous wheelchair can learn about the locations in a building and then take its occupant to a given place in response to a verbal command.

Because it can simply be told where to go, the wheelchair user is able to avoid the need for controlling every twist and turn of the route and can simply sit back and relax as the chair moves from one place to another based on a map stored in its memory.

'It's a system that can learn and adapt to the user,' says Nicholas Roy, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-developer of the wheelchair.

Unlike other attempts to program wheelchairs or other mobile devices, which rely on an intensive process of manually capturing a detailed map of a building, the MIT system can learn about its environment in much the same way as a person would, by being taken around once on a guided tour, with important places identified along the way.