ClearPath Indoor Robotic Guide for the Visually Challenged

Abstract

The ClearPath project's goal is to create a proof of concept robotic platform intended to guide a visually impaired person indoors. Ideally, a sensor-rich, smart environment would assist the guide robot's planning and run-time navigation while the robot guides the blind user through the building. The first project phase in this effort is to demonstrate the potential of indoor guidance for the blind. It focuses on a typical scenario where a sight-challenged user needs to leave a room, traverse hallways, and eventually reaches the target destination place in the same physical building. The Teleo-Reactive​,​ rule-based paradigm is used for travel plan representation and overall plan execution control. It was selected for its integrated task-level, goal-directed and reactive control properties. This solution satisfactorily matches the requirements and also allows for a highly modular design and implementation. Though a client-server architecture is used in this first phase, software development task partitioning is the primary reason for its use. This talk will describe how an off-the-shelf robot can demonstrate the potential for this application using the Teleo-Reactive paradigm for goal-directed task control and plan monitoring.

Description

A colleague is slowly losing his eyesight and recently proposed a challenge to develop a proof of concept appliance that a vision-limited person could use indoors to assist traveling from one room through a building to another room. Recognizing that this would be far less capable than what a service animal could provide, sometimes a guide dog is just not the most appropriate solution indoors. This is a friendly challenge but none the less taken seriously and serves as the motivation for the "ClearPath" project.

The ClearPath project's goal is to create a proof of concept robotic platform intended to guide a visually impaired person indoors. Ideally, a sensor-rich, smart environment would assist the guide robot's planning and run-time navigation while the robot guides the blind user through the building. This presentation describes the first project phase in this effort for indoor guidance for the blind. It focuses on a typical scenario where a sight-challenged user needs to leave a room, traverse hallways, and eventually reach the target destination place in the same physical building. The Teleo-Reactive rule-based paradigm is used for travel plan representation and overall plan execution control. It was selected for its goal-directed and reactive properties. This solution satisfactorily matched the requirements and also allowed for a highly modular design and implementation.

This talk describes the first phase of the ClearPath project whose goal is to create a proof of concept robotic platform intended to guide a visually impaired person indoors. Ideally, a sensor-rich, smart environment would assist the guide robot's planning and run-time navigation while the robot guides the blind user through the building. This presentation describes the first project phase in this effort for indoor guidance for the blind. It focuses on a typical scenario where a sight-challenged user needs to leave a room, traverse hallways, and eventually reach the target destination place in the same physical building. The Teleo-Reactive rule-based paradigm is used for travel plan representation and overall plan execution control. It was selected for its goal-directed and reactive properties. This solution satisfactorily matched the requirements and also allowed for a highly modular design and implementation.

Presentation by

Dr. Ed. Katz

Northeastern University, Silicon Valley