As the wheelchair rolled toward a TSA gate from the ticket counter, the thing that stuck out the most was what wasn’t there — someone pushing it.

The wheelchair navigated the security line and rolled toward the gates beyond checkpoint C at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport Wednesday all by itself — no pushing or steering required.

Researchers and students at Morgan State University have been developing the autonomous wheelchair over the past five years, an innovation they hope will soon make it easier for people with disabilities and limited mobility to navigate large, complex environments like airports and hospitals. It could be introduced to BWI’s terminals within a few years.

Morgan’s National Transportation Center has been studying autonomous vehicles for years now. So when the Federal Aviation Administration put out a design challenge back in 2020, it gave researchers an idea.

“We thought, how can we use this autonomous vehicle technology in aviation, but for all people?” said Mansoureh Jeihani, director of the National Transportation Center.

The prototype is actually a retrofitted electric-powered wheelchair. The team started with the base model, then gave it “perception vision” and the ability to think, said Kofi Nyarko, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of Morgan State’s artificial intelligence center.

It uses a camera and LiDAR, a technology that reads its surrounding by examining changes in light as it bounces off of nearby objects. It’s the same sort of gear employed by autonomous cars, a burgeoning technology made famous by driverless taxi companies like Waymo. Morgan State researchers are also using the technology to measure traffic and pedestrian patterns at so-called “smart intersections” across parts of Baltimore.

Users will be able to log into a mobile app called Urban Flow, which is also currently in testing, and set a pickup location on an airport map when they arrive. They’d tell it their gate, and update their destination at any time to include stops at the restroom or a restaurant.

The LiDAR system spots obstacles, in addition to detecting invisible “track” markers programmed all over the airport that tell it where it is and guide it to where it needs to go. There are also pre-programmed “no-go” areas like escalators and employee-only spaces that it knows to avoid for safety reasons.

Passengers can override the system and take control at any point, as can a remote operator who would be employed to manage the “fleet” of wheelchairs available.

During Wednesday’s demonstration, two travelers walked in front of the wheelchair on the main concourse as it was approaching the security line. It gently stopped to allow the travelers to walk by and started moving again shortly after.

It wasn’t a “canned” presentation, Nyarko quipped to the crowd — the travelers, who seemed confused as to why a large group was suddenly watching them walk through the airport, weren’t participants, but helped the research team show how the wheelchair would react in a busy environment.

Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller, a transportation engineer by trade, was there Wednesday to observe the demonstration. She remarked that navigating airports can be exhausting and stressful for those with limited mobility and require them to set aside even more time for catching a flight.

“You’re not just pushing boundaries of technology, you’re ensuring that innovation serves humanity,” Miller told Morgan State researchers and students. The autonomous wheelchair “isn’t just innovation, it’s inclusion,” she said.

There were roughly 27 million requests for wheelchairs at domestic airports in 2019, the latest available research when the team started researching, Jeihani said. And the average wait time for service was 40 minutes, due in large part to a shortage of workers to guide people. Her team doesn’t see the autonomous wheelchair as a total replacement of airport attendants helping travelers get to where they need to go, but an innovation that can augment service.

Realistically, it will be at least a year or two before a true rollout of the technology for use at airports or other locations. But the partnership with BWI has helped to create a working proof-of-concept. Jeihani’s team is now reaching out to Southwest Airlines and other carriers, which contract for wheelchair service at airports, to get them on board, as well as seeking a manufacturer to build it. They’ve also applied for a patent.

And they’re not going to stop there, Jeihani said.

Eventually, they want to integrate the wheelchair system with autonomous vans so that users could board paratransit service (think about the Maryland Transit Administration’s Mobility vans) without human assistance. They’re also looking into how to move airport luggage.

“It is designed with dignity, designed with accessibility in mind,” said Morgan State University President David Wilson. “We are not just imagining a better future, but we’re engineering it.”