Quadrupedal Robotic Guide Dog with Vocal Human-Robot Interaction
This addresses the time- and labor-intensive training of guide dogs for visually impaired individuals, but it is incremental as it applies existing robotics and cloud technologies to a new application.
The researchers tackled the problem of automating guide dog functions by developing an autonomous quadrupedal robot that physically guides humans using vocal communication, with the algorithm deployed on a Unitree A1 robot and speech interface leveraging cloud services like Amazon Polly and Google Cloud.
Guide dogs play a critical role in the lives of many, however training them is a time- and labor-intensive process. We are developing a method to allow an autonomous robot to physically guide humans using direct human-robot communication. The proposed algorithm will be deployed on a Unitree A1 quadrupedal robot and will autonomously navigate the person to their destination while communicating with the person using a speech interface compatible with the robot. This speech interface utilizes cloud based services such as Amazon Polly and Google Cloud to serve as the text-to-speech and speech-to-text engines.