ATDev gives update on its journey building autonomous wheelchairs

Assistive Technology Development Inc. (ATDev), based in Orange, Calif., provided an update on its work developing an autonomous power wheelchair paired with a coordinated robotic arm, per The Robot Report. The company is an industry partner in the Robotic Assistive Mobility and Manipulation Platform (RAMMP), an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H)-funded program led by the University of Pittsburgh.

RAMMP aims to combine robotics, AI, and smart mobility to help people with mobility impairments live more independently. ATDev's role within the consortium focuses specifically on the wheelchair hardware and software stack. The platform pairs a modern power wheelchair with a robotic arm designed to handle tasks users cannot perform on their own — opening doors, turning on lights, and assisting with eating and drinking. The company is also exploring teleoperation features that would let users send the chair to retrieve objects while they remain in bed.

ATDev's founders say the wheelchair industry has been largely stagnant on the electronics and software side. "We're really starting from the ground and rebuilding a lot of the electronics and software architecture that haven't allowed for innovation in this space," founder and chief marketing officer Owen Kent told The Robot Report. Kent, who has used a power wheelchair for over 30 years, said current chairs carry less computing power than a smartphone. Co-founder and CEO Todd Roberts added that the company plans to redesign everything except the complex seating systems, which he described as already technically mature.

Rather than full autonomy, ATDev is pursuing what it calls a "spectrum of autonomy" — a shared-control model where the chair handles micro-adjustments while the user decides the overall path and can dial the level of autonomous assistance up or down in real time. Roberts noted this is a meaningful safety advantage over fully autonomous systems: a user in the chair can provide corrective input if the system starts to err, unlike a humanoid robot acting entirely on its own. Safety for a paralyzed user interacting with a robotic arm near their face remains one of the hardest engineering challenges, both founders acknowledged.

ATDev is currently working with Meta to apply Meta's AI models — particularly for rapid environment segmentation in home settings — to the wheelchair platform. Both ATDev and RAMMP are committed to open-source software, and Roberts said much of the software layer is being released publicly to attract collaborators. The company is also planning a federated learning system that would let chairs learn from one another, with users able to share learned behaviors through an app-store-style interface.

On the regulatory side, Roberts said there is an existing FDA roadmap for conventional power wheelchairs but no established pathway yet for autonomous, self-manipulating robotic mobility platforms. ATDev expects to work directly with ARPA-H and the FDA — facilitated by its federal program status — to develop new technical milestones and adjust regulatory requirements. The company does not have a firm launch timeline but its founders told The Robot Report they expect to bring an FDA-cleared, insurance-reimbursable chair to market within five years. Kent cited the 3.5 million power wheelchair users currently in the U.S. as the scale of the addressable need, a figure ARPA-H and the federal government are also tracking as the baby boomer population ages.