SAATT Nav: a Socially Aware Autonomous Transparent Transportation Navigation Framework for Wheelchairs

Developing autonomous electric wheelchairs capable of long-horizon sidewalk navigation is critical for accessible personal mobility, yet existing approaches either focus on indoor map-based navigation or rely on expensive, complex sensor stacks to achieve full autonomy. In this work, we propose to tackle outdoor sidewalk navigation by leveraging visual navigation foundation models and large-scale navigation datasets, which offer strong generalization using lightweight hardware. To this end, we present ChairNav, a novel framework that adapts a general visual navigation model into a personalized electric wheelchair navigation system using a three-stage data pyramid. To address the scarcity of in-domain data, ChairNav first pre-trains on large-scale cross-embodiment datasets transformed into the wheelchair domain, followed by mid-training on a small number of wheelchair demonstrations to eliminate remaining domain gaps. Finally, a post-training stage refines the deployed model from user interventions to personalize its behavior. We deploy ChairNav on a commercial electric wheelchair equipped with an RGB-D camera and an onboard NVIDIA Jetson compute module. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of each stage in our data pyramid: pre-training reduces lateral ADE by 18%, and post-training increases the mean distance between user interventions from 29.2 m to 57.4 m. Further evaluation on kilometer-scale urban sidewalk routes shows that our system operates autonomously for 93.4% of total driving time, demonstrating its potential for everyday accessible mobility. Demo video and more details are at https://vail.cs.ucla.edu/ChairNav/.

Assistive autonomous robots operating in multi-agent environments require efficient strategies to locate specific individuals among multiple residents. Current social navigation methods focus on reactive collision avoidance and trajectory adaptation, but lack mechanisms to proactively gather information through human-robot communication. We introduce Communication-enabled Social Navigation (CommNav). In this novel task, robotic agents actively seek assistance from residents to locate target individuals by requesting information about recent sightings, locations, and movements. To evaluate CommNav, we extend Habitat 3.0 to create Habitat 3.0c, a communication-enabled variant supporting multi-human environments with information exchange protocols. Adding our communication module (COMM) to a state-of-the-art social navigation model yields a 10 percentage-point improvement in Episode Success. We further investigate the transition from structured data to natural language by evaluating models trained on LLM-generated instructions and on colloquial instructions collected from a human study. Our experiments reveal that: (i) explicit human-robot communication substantially enhances multi-person navigation performance; (ii) pre-training COMM on a communication pretext task effectively addresses the challenge of occasional interaction signals; and (iii) the navigation policy is highly robust to natural, colloquial human language, achieving an episode success statistically similar to the model using perfect structured data.

Wheelchair users call for assistive mobility systems that provide active support, adapt to dynamic environments, and are intuitive and user-friendly. However, powered wheelchairs typically still provide limited autonomy and lack effective integration with advanced perception and navigation capabilities, particularly in complex real-world environments. This paper presents a preliminary study toward autonomous powered wheelchairs for real-world assistive mobility. We introduce a proof-of-concept prototype that integrates autonomous perception, gesture-based interaction, and navigation on a commercially available self-balancing powered wheelchair. The proposed system builds upon Genny Zero, a commercial self-balancing wheelchair that enables hands-free and intuitive operation through body-weight shifting. To extend its capabilities toward autonomous operation, we integrate an RGB-D camera for human-aware perception and interaction, together with a LiDAR sensor for localization and navigation. We demonstrate the integrated system in two assistive applications: (i) hailing, allowing users to call the wheelchair from a distance; and (ii) people-following, where the wheelchair follows a person using leader-follower strategies, including a constrained indoor navigation example. The results highlight the potential of combining autonomous robotics with assistive mobility platforms, while also showing the feasibility of the proposed integration and identifying the main technical challenges that must be addressed before moving toward user-ready, accessible, and intelligent mobility solutions. A video demonstrating the experimental setup and results is available at: https://youtu.be/LVAix_Qx7bM.