Related papers: WanderGuide: Indoor Map-less Robotic Guide for Exp…
Navigation is an essential ability for mobile agents to be completely autonomous and able to perform complex actions. However, the problem of navigation for agents with limited (or no) perception of the world, or devoid of a fully defined…
Navigation is a must-have skill for any mobile robot. A core challenge in navigation is the need to account for an ample number of possible configurations of environment and navigation contexts. We claim that a mobile robot should be able…
We introduce two iOS apps that have been designed to support wayfinding and backtracking for blind travelers navigating in indoor building environments. Wayfinding involves determining and following a route through the building's corridors…
Autonomous exploration of unknown environments is a key capability for mobile robots, but it is largely unsolved for robots equipped with only a single monocular camera and no dense range sensors. In this paper, we present a novel approach…
Navigational signs enable humans to navigate unfamiliar environments without maps. This work studies how robots can similarly exploit signs for mapless navigation in the open world. A central challenge lies in interpreting signs: real-world…
AI tools like ChatGPT and Be-My-AI are increasingly being used by blind individuals. Although prior work has explored their use in some Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tasks by blind individuals, little is known about how they use these tools and the…
Approximately 200 million individuals around the world suffer from varying degrees of visual impairment, making it crucial to leverage AI technology to offer walking assistance for these people. With the recent progress of vision-language…
Hand-drawn maps can be used to convey navigation instructions between humans and robots in a natural and efficient manner. However, these maps can often contain inaccuracies such as scale distortions and missing landmarks which present…
Situated reasoning often relies on active exploration, yet in many real-world scenarios such exploration is infeasible due to physical constraints of robots or safety concerns of visually impaired users. Given only a limited observation,…
Humanoid robots are designed to navigate environments accessible to humans using their legs. However, classical research has primarily focused on controlled laboratory settings, resulting in a gap in developing controllers for navigating…
For effective human-robot collaboration, it is crucial for robots to understand requests from users and ask reasonable follow-up questions when there are ambiguities. While comprehending the users' object descriptions in the requests,…
Recent studies have focused on facilitating perception and outdoor navigation for people with blindness or some form of vision loss. However, a significant portion of these studies is centered around treatment and vision rehabilitation,…
The rise of embodied AI applications has enabled robots to perform complex tasks which require a sophisticated understanding of their environment. To enable successful robot operation in such settings, maps must be constructed so that they…
Eye-GUIDE is an assistive communication tool designed for the paralyzed or physically impaired people who were unable to move parts of their bodies especially people whose communications are limited only to eye movements. The prototype…
Visually impaired individuals rely heavily on accurate and timely information about obstacles and their surrounding environments to achieve independent living. In recent years, significant progress has been made in the development of…
While autonomous multi-robots can achieve safe and coordinated navigation, they often struggle to adapt to unforeseen conditions and to capture operator-driven objectives in unstructured environments. We present a Virtual Reality (VR)-based…
Navigating towards fully open language goals and exploring open scenes in an intelligent way have always raised significant challenges. Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to reason with both…
Empowering people who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) to enhance their orientation and mobility skills is critical to equalizing their access to social and economic opportunities. To manage this crucial challenge, we employed a novel…
Globally, 340 million people have blindness or moderate to severe visual impairment (BVI)$^1$ which limits independent outdoor navigation$^2$ and negatively affects their health and quality of life$^{3,4}$. We surveyed 112 people with BVI…
Various studies have been conducted on human-supporting robot systems. These systems have been put to practical use over the years and are now seen in our daily lives. In particular, robots communicating smoothly with people are expected to…