Larisa Loke

Larisa Loke

Postdoctoral Researcher at Northwestern University & Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, working on human-AI co-adaptation and personalization for assistive robotics.

Intelligent Powered Wheelchair: Reactive Shared Control

Overview

Current work (RSS 2026), built with my lab at Northwestern & Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Developed a ROS 2 (Python/C++) codebase to interface with a commercial powered wheelchair equipped with LUCI assistive drive technology, including packages for human input control interfacing, shared control, command arbitration, sensor stream processing, odometry, and navigation using the ROS Nav Stack.

Main contributions:

  • A reactive assistance control scheme for local guidance around obstacles during wheelchair driving.
  • A large-scale, longitudinal user study with powered wheelchair users across a range of motor impairments and control interfaces, testing usability and effectiveness of the reactive assistance scheme in standard and custom indoor and outdoor driving ADL tasks.
  • A review of existing and newly developed robotic wheelchair HRI evaluation metrics, spanning user, clinical, and engineering perspectives.