With the increase in the number of senior citizens, there has been a growing demand for human-friendly wheelchairs as mobility aids. This paper proposes the concept of an intelligent wheelchair to meet this need. It can understand human intentions by observing the user's nonverbal behaviors and can move as the user wishes with minimal human operations. It also describes our experimental robotic wheelchair system. Human intentions appear most on his/her face. Thus, the experimental system observes the human face, computing the direction of the face. As the first step toward the intelligent wheelchair, we have performed experiments on controlling the system's motion according to the direction of the face. Experimental results prove our approach promising.
