An Autonomous Wheelchair at an Art Gallery

Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam, 16 December 2009 to 8 March 2010

Our robotic wheelchair has been exhibited at Niet Normaal in Amsterdam from December 2009 to March 2010. See a Youtube video or a local copy (WMV) (thanks to Aram Voermans for filming and editing).

Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA),  London, 2008

The autonomous wheelchair "Psalms" commissioned by the late Donald Rodney in 1997 has been exhibited at the exhibition "Donald Rodney In Retrospect". Curated by Sebastian Lopez and Keith Piper. Produced by Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts).

Psalms and Britannia Hospital 3 (Installation view of Donald Rodney in Retrospect)	Installation view of Donald Rodney in Retrospect Photograph © Thierry Bal, Courtesy of Iniva at Rivington Place

South London Gallery 1997

An autonomous wheelchair has become a piece of art named "Psalms" as a part of an exhibition entitled "Nine Night in Eldorado" by Donald Rodney, held at the South London Gallery until the 12th October 1997 (Fig 1,2,3 and wc1.mov).

"...Our fear of automata is again harnessed in Psalms, as the empty wheelchair courses through its various trajectories on a sad and lonely journey of life, a journey to nowhere. Its movements repeat like an ever recurring memory, a memory of another life and another journey, that of Donald Rodney's father..." (Exhibition brochure, Jane Bilton.)

Fig.1. A part of the exhibition. (click on the images to see larger versions)	Fig.2. Waiting for a conversation to end before resuming its walk... ...or taking part ?	Fig.3. A lonely presence after the closure.

Fig.4. Orientation of the sonar sensors. The sensors are mainly oriented in front for safety reasons. Sensors 1,3,5 and 8 are also used for self-localisation purpose when the wheelchair is oriented parallel to a wall.

Fig.5. Neural network based on normalised RBF nodes encoding a sequence of sequences of positions (a figure of eight in this example). Layer L1 comprises input nodes representing the x,y position of the wheelchair. Layer L2 comprises usual RBF nodes centred on successive positions. Nodes in layer L3 perform the normalisation so that their ouputs represent positions in the same form as nodes in layer L1. More details on normalised RBF nets can be found in Althofer and Bugmann (1995), Bugmann (1996), Bugmann et al. (1998).

Contributors:

• Dr. Guido Bugmann (School of Computing, University of Plymouth)
  
• Kheng Lee Koay (School of Computing, University of Plymouth)
  
• Dr. Nigel Barlow (School of Computing, University of Plymouth)
  
  with the help of Steve Hill (SoC) and Prof. Mike Denham (SoC),
  and the support of Technical Services of the University of Plymouth.
  
  Financial support was provided by
  
  
• A Grant of the Henry Moore Foundation to the South London Gallery.
  
• The Mobile Robotics Laboratory in the Centre for Neural and Adaptive Systems (Prof. Mike Denham) of the School of Computing of the University of Plymouth (UoP).
  
  We gratefully acknowledge material and technical support by:
  
  
• Plymouth Disability Equipment Centre
  
• British Aerospace Systems & Equipment, Plymouth
  
• Penny and Giles Drives Technology Ltd, Christchurch BH23 4HD, UK.
  
• Paul Robinson (School of Electronic, Communic. & Electrical Eng., UoP)
  
  We gratefully acknowledge the following people for their very helpful advice:
  
  
• Dr. Alan Simpson (School of Electronic, Communic. & Electrical Eng., UoP)
  
• Peter Nurse (School of Manufact., Materials & Mech. Eng., UoP)
  
• Peter Frere (Lucas Advanced Engineering Centre, Birmingham)
  
• Dr. David Keating (Dept. Cybernetic, University of Reading)
  
  We are very grateful to Mike Phillips (School of Computing, University of Plymouth) for initiating this project by establishing the initial link between the artist and the builders.
  
  Many technical solutions in the control system of the wheelchair are based on sub-systems developped during the projects realised by following students: Vincent Onillon, Priska Shönborn, Antonio Rodriguez Perez, Jose Dorado, Petr Bunus, Derrick Tapscott.
  
  
  

  References:

  "Planning and Learning Goal-Directed Sequences of Robot-Arm movements" (41411)
  Althöfer K. and Bugmann G. (1995)
  Proc. of ICANN'95, Paris, Vol. 1, 449-454.

  "Note on the Use of Weight-Averaging Output Nodes in RBF-Based Mapping nets" (60120)
  Bugmann, G. (1996)
  Research Report CNAS-96-02
  

  "Stable Encoding of Robot Trajectories using Normalised Radial Basis Functions: Application to an Autonomous Wheelchair" (83,209),
  Bugmann G., Koay K.L., Barlow N., Phillips M. and Rodney D. (1998)
  Proc. 29th Intl. Symp. Robotics, 27-30 April, Birmingham, UK.
  

  "Normalized Radial Basis Function Networks" (Preprint, 179,885)
  Bugmann, G. (1998)
  Neurocomputing (Special Issue on Radial Basis Function Networks), 20, pp. 97-110. (ISSN : 0925-2312)

  "Stable Encoding of Robot Trajectories using Normalised Radial Basis Networks: Application to an Autonomous Wheelchair." (PDF 337KB)
  Bugmann G., Koay K.L., Robinson P. (2006)
  The International Journal of Vehicle Autonomous Systems (IJVAS), Special issue on "Computational Intelligence and Its Applications to Mobile Robots and Autonomous Systems". Vol. 4 No 2-4. PP. 239-249.

   

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  Guido Bugmann, Jan 2010