GuideNav: User-Informed Development of a Vision-Only Robotic Navigation Assistant For Blind Travelers

TL;DR

GuideNav is a vision-only robotic navigation system designed to assist blind travelers by autonomously repeating paths demonstrated by sighted users, inspired by guide dog training, and validated through field tests and user studies.

Contribution

This work introduces GuideNav, a novel vision-based navigation system for BLV individuals, developed from human-centered insights and capable of reliable kilometer-scale route following without heavy sensors.

Findings

GuideNav successfully follows routes over kilometer distances in outdoor environments.

The system maintains reliability despite scene variations between teach and repeat phases.

User studies confirm the system's feasibility and similarity to guide dog assistance.

Abstract

While commendable progress has been made in user-centric research on mobile assistive systems for blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals, references that directly inform robot navigation design remain rare. To bridge this gap, we conducted a comprehensive human study involving interviews with 26 guide dog handlers, four white cane users, nine guide dog trainers, and one O\&M trainer, along with 15+ hours of observing guide dog-assisted walking. After de-identification, we open-sourced the dataset to promote human-centered development and informed decision-making for assistive systems for BLV people. Building on insights from this formative study, we developed GuideNav, a vision-only, teach-and-repeat navigation system. Inspired by how guide dogs are trained and assist their handlers, GuideNav autonomously repeats a path demonstrated by a sighted person using a robot. Specifically, the system constructs a topological representation of the taught route, integrates visual place recognition with temporal filtering, and employs a relative pose estimator to compute navigation actions - all without relying on costly, heavy, power-hungry sensors such as LiDAR. In field tests, GuideNav consistently achieved kilometer-scale route following across five outdoor environments, maintaining reliability despite noticeable scene variations between teach and repeat runs. A user study with 3 guide dog handlers and 1 guide dog trainer further confirmed the system's feasibility, marking (to our knowledge) the first demonstration of a quadruped mobile system retrieving a path in a manner comparable to guide dogs.