CaBot: Designing and Evaluating an Autonomous Navigation Robot for Blind People
Abstract
Navigation robots have the potential to overcome some of the limitations of traditional navigation aids for blind people, specially in unfamiliar environments. In this paper, we present the design of CaBot (Carry-on roBot), an autonomous suitcase-shaped navigation robot that is able to guide blind users to a destination while avoiding obstacles on their path. We conducted a user study where ten blind users evaluated specific functionalities of CaBot, such as a vibro-tactile handle to convey directional feedback; experimented to find their comfortable walking speed; and performed navigation tasks to provide feedback about their overall experience. We found that CaBot's performance highly exceeded users' expectations, who often compared it to navigating with a guide dog or sighted guide. Users' high confidence, sense of safety, and trust on CaBot poses autonomous navigation robots as a promising solution to increase the mobility and independence of blind people, in particular in unfamiliar environments.
BibTeX
@conference{Guerreiro-2019-118730,author = {João Guerreiro and Daisuke Sato and Saki Asakawa and Huixu Dong and Kris M. Kitani and Chieko Asakawa},
title = {CaBot: Designing and Evaluating an Autonomous Navigation Robot for Blind People},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '19)},
year = {2019},
month = {October},
pages = {68 - 82},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {blind navigation, guide robot, human-robot interaction, mobility, obstacle avoidance},
}