Related papers: Flying Guide Dog: Walkable Path Discovery for the …
Guide dogs offer independence to Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) individuals, yet their limited availability leaves the vast majority of BLV users without access. Quadruped robotic guide dogs present a promising alternative, but existing systems…
Quadruped locomotion is currently a vibrant research area, which has reached a level of maturity and performance that enables some of the most advanced real-world applications with autonomous quadruped robots both in academia and industry.…
Following language instructions to navigate in unseen environments is a challenging task for autonomous embodied agents. With strong representation capabilities, pretrained vision-and-language models are widely used in VLN. However, most of…
The deployment of autonomous service robots in human-centric environments is hindered by a critical gap in perception and planning. Traditional navigation systems rely on expensive LiDARs that, while geometrically precise, are semantically…
Understanding the traversability of terrain is essential for autonomous robot navigation, particularly in unstructured environments such as natural landscapes. Although traditional methods, such as occupancy mapping, provide a basic…
In vegetated environments, such as forests, exploratory robots play a vital role in navigating complex, cluttered environments where human access is limited and traditional equipment struggles. Visual occlusion from obstacles, such as…
Legged robots, particularly quadrupeds, offer promising navigation capabilities, especially in scenarios requiring traversal over diverse terrains and obstacle avoidance. This paper addresses the challenge of enabling legged robots to…
Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) task is to navigate an agent to an object category in unseen environments without a pre-built map. In this paper, we solve this task by predicting the distance to the target using semantically-related…
With respect to biological findings underlying fly's physiology in the past decade, we present a directionally selective neural network, with a feed-forward structure and entirely low-level visual processing, so as to implement direction…
Common fully glazed facades and transparent objects present architectural barriers and impede the mobility of people with low vision or blindness, for instance, a path detected behind a glass door is inaccessible unless it is correctly…
Visually impaired individuals face significant challenges navigating and interacting with unknown situations, particularly in tasks requiring spatial awareness and semantic scene understanding. To accelerate the development and evaluate the…
Semantic segmentation enables robots to perceive and reason about their environments beyond geometry. Most of such systems build upon deep learning approaches. As autonomous robots are commonly deployed in initially unknown environments,…
Blind people face a lot of problems in their daily routines. They have to struggle a lot just to do their day-to-day chores. In this paper, we have proposed a system with the objective to help the visually impaired by providing audio aid…
This paper presents AI Guide Dog (AIGD), a lightweight egocentric (first-person) navigation system for visually impaired users, designed for real-time deployment on smartphones. AIGD employs a vision-only multi-label classification approach…
This paper investigates the potential of vision-language models (VLMs) to assist people with blindness and low vision (pBLV) in navigation tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art closed-source models, including GPT-4V, GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro,…
We present a weakly-supervised approach to segmenting proposed drivable paths in images with the goal of autonomous driving in complex urban environments. Using recorded routes from a data collection vehicle, our proposed method generates…
Path planning with strong environmental adaptability plays a crucial role in robotic navigation in unstructured outdoor environments, especially in the case of low-quality location and map information. The path planning ability of a robot…
Multi-View Pedestrian Detection (MVPD) aims to detect pedestrians in the form of a bird's eye view (BEV) from multi-view images. In MVPD, end-to-end trainable deep learning methods have progressed greatly. However, they often struggle to…
Visual bird's eye view (BEV) semantic segmentation helps autonomous vehicles understand the surrounding environment only from images, including static elements (e.g., roads) and dynamic elements (e.g., vehicles, pedestrians). However, the…
Seeing-eye robots are very useful tools for guiding visually impaired people, potentially producing a huge societal impact given the low availability and high cost of real guide dogs. Although a few seeing-eye robot systems have already…