In Proceedings of the Rehabilition Engineering Society of North America Annual Conference, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 20-24 June 1997. RESNA Press, 1997, pp. 414-416. PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION OF A SEMI-AUTONOMOUS ROBOTIC WHEELCHAIR DIRECTED THROUGH ELECTRODES Holly A. Yanco and James Gips MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Computer Science Department 545 Technology Square, Room 705 Boston College Cambridge, MA 02139 Chestnut Hill, MA 02167 holly@ai.mit.edu gips@cs.bc.edu ABSTRACT Many people with disabilities do not have the dexterity necessary to control a joystick on an electric wheelchair. Our system allows a semi- autonomous robotic wheelchair to be commanded by head and eye movement using electrodes placed around the eyes. Once the user issues a high level command such as "forward," the wheelchair system will perform the command while avoiding obstacles and taking care of any necessary driving adjustments. Since our system will automatically avoid obstacles and make motor corrections, less effort is required by the user to drive the system. We present preliminary results on an experimental system that combines the Wheelesley robotic wheelchair with the EagleEyes system for controlling a computer through electrodes. INTRODUCTION In recent years, researchers have started to experiment with putting computer control and sensors on an electric wheelchair (see, for example, Gomi and Ide 1996). We have developed a semi-autonomous computer controlled wheelchair that provides driving assistance by taking over low-level control. Our system provides a new method for driving a wheelchair through the use of electrodes (Figure 1). This system is intended to allow people who do not have the dexterity necessary to drive a joystick controlled system to move around the world. There are two levels of control in our system: high-level directional commands and low-level computer-controlled routines. The person using the system has the highest level of control. The user's head and eye movements are translated to screen position using the electrode system. The command at the calculated position is then sent to the robotic wheelchair. Once given a command by the user, the computer acts to keep the wheelchair out of trouble using the sensor readings. For