CANINE: Coaching Visually Impaired Users for Interactive Navigation with a Robot Guide Dog

TL;DR

CANINE is an adaptive coaching system that trains visually impaired users for interactive navigation with robot guide dogs, significantly improving learning efficiency and navigation skills through personalized verbal feedback.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-level adaptive coaching framework using knowledge tracing and foundation models for personalized training of complex human-robot coordination skills.

Findings

CANINE significantly improves learning efficiency and navigation performance.

The system demonstrates lasting skill retention after two weeks.

Effective in training a visually impaired user, with insights for real-world deployment.

Abstract

Robot guide dogs offer navigation assistance that greatly expands the independent mobility of the visually impaired, but their effective use requires subtle human-robot coordination that is difficult for users to learn from generic verbal instructions. To tackle this challenge, we present CANINE, an automated coaching system that trains users for interactive navigation with a robot guide dog, through personalized, adaptive verbal feedback. CANINE decomposes a complex coordination task into sub-skills and operates at two levels. At the high level, it decides what to train by tracking the learner's proficiency across sub-skills using knowledge tracing and prioritizing training on the weakest areas. At the low level, CANINE decides how to train each sub-skill by observing each human practice episode, using foundation models to infer the underlying causes of errors, and generating targeted verbal corrections adaptively. A controlled study with blindfolded participants, treated as a proxy population for quantitative evaluation, demonstrates that CANINE significantly improves both learning efficiency and final navigation performance compared to generic verbal instructions. We further validate CANINE through a retention study and an exploratory case study. The retention study shows lasting skill improvement after two weeks. The case study confirms CANINE's effectiveness in training a visually impaired user, while revealing additional design considerations for real-world deployment. Both are well aligned with the findings of the controlled study. Project page: https://cunjunyu.github.io/project/canine/