Autonomous Wheelchairs Deployment in Healthcare Facilities: Requirements and Challenges

Deployed autonomous wheelchairs are reliable when autonomy is constrained to bounded domains and predefined destinations, but this design choice leaves key clinical requirements unmet. In health facilities, the primary barriers are not only navigation performance, but also robust interaction with building infrastructure (doors, elevators, access control), socially and operationally appropriate behavior in crowded corridors, and safety-centered fallback when perception or planning degrades. This vision paper characterizes these recurring gaps and distills a requirements agenda for next-generation autonomous wheelchairs: (1) building and workflow compatibility as first-class subsystems; (2) explicit recovery and caregiver-in-the-loop modes; (3) semantic "last-meter" goal grounding for user-referenced destinations; and (4) on-device, timing-predictable architectures aligned with privacy and scalable deployment. To make these requirements actionable, at the CAR lab at UD, we present SWee, a working prototype that emphasizes clinical deployability through an on-device, modular edge-box architecture (VOCAR) integrating onboard sensing and language-grounded goal specification.