Smart Wheel Chair

This project was my bachelor’s thesis at IIT Jodhpur, supervised by Dr. Swagat Kumar. We developed alternate input modalities for a smart wheelchair platform to be used by people with severe motor disablilities who are unable to control a wheelchair using their hands/fingers as in the traditional way. My part of the project was in developing a control framework based on voice commands, while my colleague, Abhash Kumar Singh, worked on a control framework based on the motion and tilt of the person’s head.

This work was published at the Advances in Robotics conference in 2013 and won the best paper award.

(top) 20 utterances of the word left, (middle) the same signals with their tail ends clipped, (bottom) average Fourier spectrum of the word.

Head tilt detection using contour detection.