Probabilistic approach to recognize local navigation plans by fusing past driving information with a personalized user model

Navigating an electrical wheelchair can be very challenging due to its large size and limited maneuverability. Additionally, target users often suffer from cognitive or physical disabilities, which interfere with safe navigation. Therefore, a robotic wheelchair that helps to drive can prove invaluable. Such a wheelchair shares the control with its human operator. Typically, robots excel in fine-motion control whereas users want to remain in charge. Hence, the robot should focus its help locally and let the user decide about global behavior. Further, an effective robot should understand the navigation plans of its user. It needs to consider the user´s abilities to avoid frustrating the user with wrong assistance. In order to address these requirements, we propose a probabilistic framework to recognize local navigation plans in a user-specific way. The framework infers navigation plans online and provides a method to calibrate all model parameters from real driving data. It fuses past local information with a user-specific model to reason about how and where the user intends to navigate. We illustrate the validity of our approach by recognizing the local navigation plans of a spastic user driving in a daily environment.