Very neat – combine existing voice recognition, navigation, and wheelchair technologies to solve real problems in nursing homes. [As long as they don’t navigate by bouncing off the walls like the Roomba.]
“MIT researchers are developing a new kind of autonomous wheelchair that can learn all about the locations in a given building, and then take its occupant to a given place in response to a verbal command.
Just by saying “take me to the cafeteria” or “go to my room,” the wheelchair user would be able to avoid the need for controlling every twist and turn of the route and could simply sit back and relax as the chair moves from one place to another based on a map stored in its memory.”
The Robot State 