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Purpose: Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are becoming a promising transportation solution for blind and low-vision (BLV) travelers, offering the potential for greater independent mobility. This paper explores the information needs of BLV users…
People with lower and upper body disabilities can benefit from wheelchairs and robotic arms to improve mobility and independence. Prior assistive interfaces, such as touchscreens and voice-driven predefined commands, often remain…
Access to non-verbal cues in social interactions is vital for people with visual impairment. It has been shown that non-verbal cues such as eye contact, number of people, their names and positions are helpful for individuals who are blind.…
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made significant progress in explicit instruction-based navigation; however, their ability to interpret implicit human needs (e.g., "I am thirsty") in dynamic urban environments remains underexplored. This…
Searching for objects in unfamiliar scenarios is a challenging task for blind people. It involves specifying the target object, detecting it, and then gathering detailed information according to the user's intent. However, existing…
There are many systems for indoor navigation specially built for visually impaired people but only some has good accuracy for navigation. While there are solutions like global navigation satellite systems for the localization outdoors,…
An autonomous robot that is able to physically guide humans through narrow and cluttered spaces could be a big boon to the visually-impaired. Most prior robotic guiding systems are based on wheeled platforms with large bases with actuated…
We consider exploration tasks in which an autonomous mobile robot incrementally builds maps of initially unknown indoor environments. In such tasks, the robot makes a sequence of decisions on where to move next that, usually, are based on…
Many robots move through the world by composing locomotion primitives like steps and turns. To do so well, robots need not have primitives that make intuitive sense to humans. This becomes of paramount importance when robots are damaged and…
There is a large population of wheelchair users. Most of the wheelchair users need help with daily tasks. However, according to recent reports, their needs are not properly satisfied due to the lack of caregivers. Therefore, in this…
Navigating through unstructured environments is a basic capability of intelligent creatures, and thus is of fundamental interest in the study and development of artificial intelligence. Long-range navigation is a complex cognitive task that…
Mobile telepresence robots (MTRs) allow people to navigate and interact with a remote environment that is in a place other than the person's true location. Thanks to the recent advances in 360 degree vision, many MTRs are now equipped with…
Humanoid robots can, in principle, use their legs to go almost anywhere. Developing controllers capable of traversing diverse terrains, however, remains a considerable challenge. Classical controllers are hard to generalize broadly while…
Indoor location identification and navigation need to be as simple, seamless, and ubiquitous as its outdoor GPS-based counterpart is. It would be of great convenience to the mobile user to be able to continue navigating seamlessly as he or…
Humanoid robots, designed to operate in human-centric environments, serve as a fundamental platform for a broad range of tasks. Although humanoid robots have been extensively studied for decades, a majority of existing humanoid robots still…
Objective: Micro-navigation poses challenges for blind and visually impaired individuals. They often need to ask for sighted assistance. We explored the feasibility of utilizing ChatGPT as a virtual assistant to provide navigation…
It is a challenging task for visually impaired people to perceive their surrounding environment due to the complexity of the natural scenes. Their personal and social activities are thus highly limited. This paper introduces a Large…
This paper presents a novel multimodal perception system for a real open environment. The proposed system includes an embedded computation platform, cameras, ultrasonic sensors, GPS, and IMU devices. Unlike the traditional frameworks, our…
We consider the task of underwater robot navigation for the purpose of collecting scientifically relevant video data for environmental monitoring. The majority of field robots that currently perform monitoring tasks in unstructured natural…
Virtual Reality (VR) is inaccessible to blind people. While research has investigated many techniques to enhance VR accessibility, they require additional developer effort to integrate. As such, most mainstream VR apps remain inaccessible…