UCLA's ChairNav brings long-horizon autonomous wheelchair navigation to real sidewalks
zhoubolei · x · 2026-10-30
Bolei Zhou's team at UCLA introduces ChairNav, a research project using vision-based navigation foundation models for long-horizon autonomous wheelchair navigation in complex real-world sidewalk environments.
- Platform: a wheelchair research platform with visual perception and control
- Three-stage training: pre-training reuses delivery robot data with viewpoint/motion-target alignment; mid-training learns from human driving demonstrations; post-training turns rider takeovers into preference supervision for personalization
- Real-world evaluation: validated on multiple long-horizon routes (crossings, waiting) in both autonomous and rider-control modes, with control-state maps comparing policies
Paper: arXiv:2610.24012, with demos on the project page.
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