D4. Developing a Wayfinding Support Robot
Principal Investigator
Team Members: Wendy Rogers, Ph.D., Samuel Olatunji, Ph.D., D. Livingston McPherson, Ph.D
Students: Aamir Hasan, BSE., Maria Lusardi, B.S., John Pohovey, BSE.
Partners: Hello Robot
Wayfinding is the task of orienting and navigating spaces, which can be achieved through intuitive signage, human guides, or technology. This skill is essential for community engagement, but many people aging with vision impairment experience challenges navigating unfamiliar places. We are using an assistive mobile robot, Stretch, to enhance wayfinding for this target population. The robot (WayBot) will provide guidance to users aging with vision impairment to help them learn new spaces through navigation and orientation support. We will develop and demonstrate wayfinding algorithms, refine the robot’s adaptability, and evaluate its effectiveness as a guide. We aspire to create a general-purpose assistive robot that can navigate places like senior living facilities and other challenging environments, setting the stage for broader applications such as public transit centers, museums, hospitals, and emergency evacuations, ultimately improving autonomy and quality of life for the target population.
Current Activities
- We conducted a comprehensive literature review on state of the art in wayfinding technologies, covering nearly 250 peer reviewed research papers. Our findings show that there is little attention looking at two-way communication between people with visual impairments and wayfinding technology, and robotics approaches are in early development stages. Further, many works do not focus on older adults and do not integrate the target population into the design process.
- We conducted a series of interviews with subject matter experts, gathering insights a broad set of professionals from researchers to occupational and mobility therapists. We are currently analyzing our findings, but early impressions have given direct guidance that will be used to design our robot and have highlighted the need to focus on age-specific needs.
- We are currently developing our wayfinding robot (WayBot) to have multiple methods for communicating with the user. WayBot can guide a user to a spoken destination and answer questions about the user’s surroundings. We are currently designing algorithms for improving WayBot’s ability to understand the scene and convey navigationally important information to the user, instead of general descriptions. We are also developing the physical interface for the user (i.e., the handle / grasp point), which can provide haptic / vibration feedback to the user to warn them of upcoming motions and potential hazards.
Select Publications
- Liu, S., Hasan, A., Hong, K., Wang, R., Chang, P., Mizrachi, Z., Lin, J., McPherson, D.L., Rogers, W.A., & Driggs-Campbell, K. (2024). DRAGON: A dialogue-based robot for assistive navigation with visual language grounding. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
- Megan A. Bayles, Travis Kadylak, Shuijing Liu, Aamir Hasan, Weihang Liang, Kaiwen Hong, Kathrine Driggs-Campbell, and Wendy A. Rogers. (2022). An Interdisciplinary Approach: Potential for Robotic Support to Address Wayfinding Barriers Among Persons with Visual Impairments. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society’s International Annual Meeting (HFES).
Project Alumni
- Shuijing Liu, PhD
- Jude Okoro, MS