Assistive Robotics for Empowering Humans with Visual Impairments to Independently Perform Day-to-day Tasks

The ability to perform common day-today tasks is essential for an independent lifestyle. However, many crucial tasks are unaddressed for blind or visually impaired (BVI) people with the current solutions. Our research goal aims to provide technical solutions to such problems to help support more autonomy for BVI people. Through this work, we present a proof-of-concept socially assistive robotic cane that can assist with 1) a navigation task which is finding a socially preferred seat in unknown public places and guiding the users toward it, 2) a manipulation task which is locating and retrieving the desired product from a grocery store shelf. We evaluated our system in an initial pilot study with sighted blindfolded testers, with encouraging results that show the system's potential to provide purposeful and effective navigation guidance optimizing for users' convenience, privacy, and intimacy while increasing their confidence in independent navigation. Another study we ran showed the system's success in locating and providing effective fine-grain manipulation guidance to retrieve desired products with novice users while eliciting a positive user experience.