A Dialogue-Based Human-Robot Interaction Protocol for Wheelchair and Robotic Arm Integrated Control

Abstract

People with lower and upper body disabilities can benefit from wheelchairs and robotic arms to improve mobility and independence. Prior assistive interfaces, such as touchscreens and voice-driven predefined commands, often remain unintuitive and struggle to capture complex user intent. We propose a natural, dialogue based human robot interaction protocol that simulates an intelligent agent capable of communicating with users to understand intent and execute assistive actions. In a pilot study, five participants completed five assistive tasks (cleaning, drinking, feeding, drawer opening, and door opening) through dialogue-based interaction with a wheelchair and robotic arm. As a baseline, participants were required to open a door using the manual control (a wheelchair joystick and a game controller for the arm) and complete a questionnaire to gather their feedback. By analyzing the post-study questionnaires, we found that most participants enjoyed the dialogue-based interaction and assistive robot autonomy.