A team at Lehigh University in Bethlehem PA has developed a robotic wheelchair that can find it's way around city streets. Complete with laser vision!
Call me a sentimental foo, but I love it when technology actually helps people. It brings to mind the visions of "Forbidden Planet" with Robby Robot autonomously carrying Anne Francis safely back home. Time has come!
This is brilliant; a wheelchair that can find its own way to the market and back and avoid surprises along the way. Wow.
These folks and a related group have already developed a robotic wheelchair called "ATRS", that can stow and unstow itself into a van. That's pretty wonderfully enabling by itself.
In a demonstration video (below) the rider gets off the chair and into a combination lift and seat into the car. When the rider leaves the wheelchair, the chair takes itself to the back of the van and into it's own lift mechanism.
As independence enabling as that is; extend it to an independent and, to an extent, even amazingly autonomous wheelchair that can find it's own way around a city and that can recognize and avoid obstacles -- like other people -- automatically.
Just hope it doesn't get hung up in attitude like Dean Kamen's brilliant improperly marketed Ibot wheelchair.
After millenia languishing as variations on "a long stick", the lonely crutch has a new mate, designed by a company in Edmonds, WA. 