Designing a Robot Guide for Blind People in Indoor Environments

Abstract

Navigating indoors is challenging for blind people and they often rely on assistance from sighted people. We propose a solution for indoor navigation involving multi-purpose robots that will likely reside in many buildings in the future. In this report, we present a design for how robots can guide blind people to an indoor destination in an effective and socially-acceptable way. We used participatory design, creating a design team with three designers and five non-designers. All but one member of the team had a visual impairment. Our resulting design specifies how the robot and the user initially meet, how the robot guides the user through hallways and around obstacles, and how the robot and user conclude their session.