Drones and chairs and AI oh my

https://rexasi-pro.spindoxlabs.com/

What is it:

It’s a project that ostensibly wants to develop a “Swarm AI Navigation/Self Driving” system for power wheelchairs.

This would involve not only an onboard system of sensors and computers to drive the chair, but a pair of small drones to continually scan the area around the chair enabling what they call “Collaborative Navigation”, that is using the data from the chair and the drones to give the system the most up to date information of the situation around the chair so it can plot the best way forward.

So I’m kind of in two minds here.

Firstly the tech geek “ooh shiny” part of me really wants to see the setup. It sounds like an awesome project to get involved with and would involve all sorts of cool tech and problems to solve.

Secondly the powerchair user part of me really, really wants to know if they actually spoke to a wheelchair user before coming up with the idea.

Look, I’m coming at this from my own experience in using powered and manual chairs, I’m not purporting to speak for anyone else but myself.

Operating a wheelchair while out and about can be an exercise in extreme frustration and operating in crowded environments can be even more so. However by and large the challenge is more about dealing with the large chaotic system that is the human mob. Not only are you on the look out for any obstacles or accessibility issues, but you’re dealing with a herd of people that:

• By and large have trouble avoiding bumping into other people, let alone a large wheeled object
• Can at any single point change direction because they saw something or someone they want to check on, and oh isn’t that necklace lovely, ouch something just ran over my foot.

Throw in the fact that you don’t have visibility over the crowd (ye gods I miss that, I’m 194cm tall, I used to be able to see for miles in crowds, sigh) and you’re basically hoping like hell that you’re not going to injure someone.

Hrmm looking at that I can see where the idea for the project came from (and why it triggers my inner geek).

To be honest the biggest problem for me in this project isn’t the AI Assisted driving bit (though I don’t trust it in a car, and I’m really going to struggle trusting it in my wheelchair), no, it’s the drones. While having two scout drones scooting about the place doing lidar scans to map the room you’re in sounds cool, in reality what you have is two really noisy devices flying around peoples heads at a time when no one is really watching where they’re going.

Someone is going to cop a drone to the head.

It’s just not practical, and any wheelchair user would have been able to tell them that from the start.

We see this time and again, where a tech project is started with the stated goal of assisting people with disabilities, but they don’t actually involve anyone with a disability in planning or developing the projects.

Who knows, I may be completely wrong, and in twenty years, I’ll be flying down the footpath with my own cloud of microdrones constantly scanning the world around me, but somehow I don’t think so.