Designing a Wayfinding Robot for People with Visual Impairments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel autonomous wayfinding robot designed to assist visually impaired individuals in indoor navigation by providing real-time guidance, environment descriptions, and safety features, demonstrating feasibility in real-world settings.

Contribution

The work presents an in-progress autonomous robot that plans paths based on audio commands and real-time positioning, enhancing indoor navigation support for visually impaired users.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated in a public indoor environment

Real-time position estimation improves safety

Periodic environment descriptions aid orientation

Abstract

People with visual impairments (PwVI) often have difficulties navigating through unfamiliar indoor environments. However, current wayfinding tools are fairly limited. In this short paper, we present our in-progress work on a wayfinding robot for PwVI. The robot takes an audio command from the user that specifies the intended destination. Then, the robot autonomously plans a path to navigate to the goal. We use sensors to estimate the real-time position of the user, which is fed to the planner to improve the safety and comfort of the user. In addition, the robot describes the surroundings to the user periodically to prevent disorientation and potential accidents. We demonstrate the feasibility of our design in a public indoor environment. Finally, we analyze the limitations of our current design, as well as our insights and future work. A demonstration video can be found at https://youtu.be/BS9r5bkIass.