Malvina is developing her Master thesis to calibrate an eye tracker (of XTensa) and use it for wheelchair control. This would enable severely impaired peoples to recover part of their mobility.
Hereafter a video of some preliminary results of the eye tracker use inside a virtual environment (the 3D model of the Mechatronics laboratory in Povo 2). The results are very encouraging!
We already won one of the two best demo award at the 6th GTTI Thematic Meeting on Multimedia Signal Processing!
Figure – Parts of the disassembled wheelchair. This was a manual outdoor model that we are going to control with a robotic control unit.
After proper validation in virtual environment we are planning to employ the control scheme onboard a real wheelchair. Now it is not in a good shape but we are going to reassemble it providing a mean to make it a robotic agent (integrating an industrial PC, encoders on the wheels and motor drivers). This will enable the study and development of active and semi autonomous control modalities.
