The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) has been developing autonomous vehicles of all types. In 2013 they developed a driverless golf cart, and in 2016 SMART created a fleet of autonomous vehicles to bring driverless taxi services to Singapore.

Now, the alliance has developed an autonomous wheelchair that was deployed this week in a Singaporean hospital. The initiative is headed by Daniela Rus, the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The wheelchair is an extension of the self-driving scooter developed by SMART in 2016.

The idea to create the autonomous wheelchair came about from observations by Rus, who is also the principal investigator of the SMART Future Urban Mobility research group, that in hospitals and in nursing care facilities staff spend too much time moving patients around, when that time can be spent on concentrating on patient care.

"When we visited several retirement communities, we realized that the quality of life is dependent on mobility. We want to make it really easy for people to move around," Rus says.

Take a look at this video created by MIT: https://bcove.video/2uCE44D