Development of intelligent wheelchair acquiring autonomous, cooperative, and collaborative behavior

An intelligent wheelchair (IWC) prototype system: ACCoMo is developed to aid indoor safe mobility for physically challenged people. ACCoMo, as an agent, can acquire autonomous, cooperative, and collaborative behavior. The autonomous behavior realizes safe and effective moves with observing local real environments. The cooperative behavior emerges from interactions within other ACCoMos dynamically. The collaborative behavior aims to assist user operations, and provides functions for connecting to various ubiquitous devices. These behaviors are acquired with learning and evolution of intelligent ACCoMo agents through their experience in the real or virtual environments. Through experiments in real world environments, it is shown that the agent can acquire these intelligent behaviors on ACCoMo.