WanderGuide: Indoor Map-less Robotic Guide for Exploration by Blind People

2025-02-13

AI Summary

Blind users face significant challenges in autonomously exploring unknown environments when no pre-built maps are available. Method: This paper proposes a novel map-less navigation paradigm enabling destination-free, interest-driven indoor roaming. It integrates multimodal perception with real-time SLAM—without reliance on global maps—and establishes a natural-language interaction architecture supporting user intent understanding, three-tier adjustable semantic descriptions (overview → key objects → fine-grained details), and question-answering–based dynamic navigation. Contributions/Results: First, it formally defines a map-less navigation framework tailored to blind users’ goal-free exploration. Second, it introduces a real-time environmental description mechanism with tunable semantic granularity. Third, it designs a human–AI collaborative, lightweight voice interaction workflow. Evaluation with five blind participants in real-world shopping mall and museum settings demonstrates significantly improved environmental perception freedom and task autonomy, reduced cognitive load, and enhanced enjoyment and immersion in exploration.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Localization, Mapping, and Navigation
• Humans and AI: AI for Accessibility
• Natural Language Processing: Language Grounding & Multi-modal NLP

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

Blind people have limited opportunities to explore an environment based on their interests. While existing navigation systems could provide them with surrounding information while navigating, they have limited scalability as they require preparing prebuilt maps. Thus, to develop a map-less robot that assists blind people in exploring, we first conducted a study with ten blind participants at a shopping mall and science museum to investigate the requirements of the system, which revealed the need for three levels of detail to describe the surroundings based on users' preferences. Then, we developed WanderGuide, with functionalities that allow users to adjust the level of detail in descriptions and verbally interact with the system to ask questions about the environment or to go to points of interest. The study with five blind participants revealed that WanderGuide could provide blind people with the enjoyable experience of wandering around without a specific destination in their minds.

Problem

• Indoor exploration for blind people
• Map-less robotic navigation system
• Adjustable detail levels in descriptions

Innovation

• Map-less robotic guide
• Adjustable detail descriptions
• Verbal interaction system