Related papers: Flying Guide Dog: Walkable Path Discovery for the …
This is a summary paper of a use case of a Robotdog dedicated to guide visually impaired people in complex environment like a smart intersection. In such scenarios, the Robotdog has to autonomously decide whether it is safe to cross the…
Highly Automated Vehicles (HAVs) can improve mobility for blind and visually impaired people (BVIPs). However, designing non-visual interfaces that enable them to maintain situation awareness inside the vehicle is a challenge. This paper…
Exploring an unfamiliar indoor environment and avoiding obstacles is challenging for visually impaired people. Currently, several approaches achieve the avoidance of static obstacles based on the mapping of indoor scenes. To solve the issue…
Currently, the visually impaired rely on either a sighted human, guide dog, or white cane to safely navigate. However, the training of guide dogs is extremely expensive, and canes cannot provide essential information regarding the color of…
Recent Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) advancements are promising, but their idealized assumptions about robot movement and control fail to reflect physically embodied deployment challenges. To bridge this gap, we introduce VLN-PE, a…
In the modern era of automation and robotics, autonomous vehicles are currently the focus of academic and industrial research. With the ever increasing number of unmanned aerial vehicles getting involved in activities in the civilian and…
People with blindness and low vision (pBLV) experience significant challenges when locating final destinations or targeting specific objects in unfamiliar environments. Furthermore, besides initially locating and orienting oneself to a…
Today, many of the aid systems deployed for visually impaired people are mostly made for a single purpose. Be it navigation, object detection, or distance perceiving. Also, most of the deployed aid systems use indoor navigation which…
Navigation and mobility are some of the major problems faced by visually impaired people in their daily lives. Advances in computer vision led to the proposal of some navigation systems. However, most of them require expensive and/or heavy…
Recent studies have focused on developing advanced assistive devices to help blind or visually impaired people. Navigation is challenging for this community; however, developing a simple yet reliable navigation system is still an unmet…
Tactile Walking Surface Indicators (TWSIs) are safety-critical landmarks that blind and low-vision (BLV) pedestrians use to locate crossings and hazard zones. From our observation sessions with BLV guide dog handlers, trainers, and an O&M…
Navigating unfamiliar environments remains one of the most persistent and critical challenges for people who are blind or have limited vision (BLV). Existing assistive tools often rely on online services or APIs, making them costly,…
For autonomous robots navigating in urban environments, it is important for the robot to stay on the designated path of travel (i.e., the footpath), and avoid areas such as grass and garden beds, for safety and social conformity…
Recently, deep-learning based approaches have achieved impressive performance for autonomous driving. However, end-to-end vision-based methods typically have limited interpretability, making the behaviors of the deep networks difficult to…
For people affected by blindness and low vision (BLV), safe and independent navigation remains a major challenge, impacting over 2.2 billion individuals worldwide. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer new opportunities…
Hybrid systems, such as bipedal walkers, are challenging to control because of discontinuities in their nonlinear dynamics. Little can be predicted about the systems' evolution without modeling the guard conditions that govern transitions…
Sensing surroundings plays a crucial role in human spatial perception, as it extracts the spatial configuration of objects as well as the free space from the observations. To facilitate the robot perception with such a surrounding sensing…
Bird's-eye-view (BEV) is a powerful and widely adopted representation for road scenes that captures surrounding objects and their spatial locations, along with overall context in the scene. In this work, we focus on bird's eye semantic…
Detecting pedestrians accurately in urban scenes is significant for realistic applications like autonomous driving or video surveillance. However, confusing human-like objects often lead to wrong detections, and small scale or heavily…
Guiding robots, in the form of canes or cars, have recently been explored to assist blind and low vision (BLV) people. Such robots can provide full or partial autonomy when guiding. However, the pros and cons of different forms and autonomy…