Related papers: WanderGuide: Indoor Map-less Robotic Guide for Exp…
Navigation presents a significant challenge for persons with visual impairments (PVI). While traditional aids such as white canes and guide dogs are invaluable, they fall short in delivering detailed spatial information and precise guidance…
Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…
For individuals who are blind or have low vision, tactile maps provide essential spatial information but are limited in the amount of data they can convey. Digitally augmented tactile maps enhance these capabilities with audio feedback,…
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…
Tour guidance in virtual museums encourages multi-modal interactions to boost user experiences, concerning engagement, immersion, and spatial awareness. Nevertheless, achieving the goal is challenging due to the complexity of comprehending…
Social robots, also known as service or assistant robots, have been developed to improve the quality of human life in recent years. The design of socially capable and intelligent robots can vary, depending on the target user groups. In this…
Blind people have limited access to information about their surroundings, which is important for ensuring one's safety, managing social interactions, and identifying approaching pedestrians. With advances in computer vision, wearable…
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…
In this paper, we deal with the problem of full-body path planning for walking robots. The state of walking robots is defined in multi-dimensional space. Path planning requires defining the path of the feet and the robot's body. Moreover,…
Service and assistive robots are increasingly being deployed in dynamic social environments; however, ensuring transparent and explainable interactions remains a significant challenge. This paper presents a multimodal explainability module…
This research aims to find where visually impaired users find appliances hard to use and suggest guideline to solve this issue. 181 visually impaired users have been surveyed, and 12 visually impaired users have been selected based on…
Walking assistance in extreme or complex environments remains a significant challenge for people with blindness or low vision (BLV), largely due to the lack of a holistic scene understanding. Motivated by the real-world needs of the BLV…
Majority of the existing robot navigation systems, which facilitate the use of laser range finders, sonar sensors or artificial landmarks, has the ability to locate itself in an unknown environment and then build a map of the corresponding…
Navigation strategies that intentionally incorporate contact with humans (i.e. "contact-based" social navigation) in crowded environments are largely unexplored even though collision-free social navigation is a well studied problem.…
In this article, we introduce a novel strategy for robotic exploration in unknown environments using a semantic topometric map. As it will be presented, the semantic topometric map is generated by segmenting the grid map of the currently…
A hybrid map representation, which consists of a modified generalized Voronoi Diagram (GVD)-based topological map and a grid-based metric map, is proposed to facilitate a new frontier-driven exploration strategy. Exploration frontiers are…
This paper presents a distributed approach for exploring and triangulating an unknown region using a multi- robot system. The objective is to produce a covering of an unknown workspace by a fixed number of robots such that the covered…
People with visual impairments perceive their environment non-visually and often use AI-powered assistive tools to obtain textual descriptions of visual information. Recent large vision-language model-based AI-powered tools like Be My AI…
We propose a learning-based navigation system for reaching visually indicated goals and demonstrate this system on a real mobile robot platform. Learning provides an appealing alternative to conventional methods for robotic navigation:…
This work introduces Guardian Angel, an Android App that assists visually impaired people to avoid danger in complex traffic environment. The system, consisting of object detection by pretrained YOLO model, distance estimation and moving…