Researchers Build a Talking Robot Guide Dog to Help Visually Impaired People Navigate (studyfinds.com) 24
"Only about 2% of visually impaired people in the United States use guide dogs," notes StudyFinds.com, "partly because breeding and training takes years and fewer than half the dogs in training actually graduate."
But someday there could be another option: What if you could ask your guide dog where the nearest water fountain is and hear it answer back, complete with directions and an estimated walk time? Researchers at the State University of New York at Binghamton have built a robotic guide dog that can do something close to that, holding simple back-and-forth conversations about navigation with its handler, describing the surrounding environment, and talking through route options as it leads the way... Their work, presented at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pairs a large language model, a system that understands and generates language, with a navigation planner. Together, the two let the robot understand open-ended requests, suggest destinations, and adjust plans on the fly.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
But someday there could be another option: What if you could ask your guide dog where the nearest water fountain is and hear it answer back, complete with directions and an estimated walk time? Researchers at the State University of New York at Binghamton have built a robotic guide dog that can do something close to that, holding simple back-and-forth conversations about navigation with its handler, describing the surrounding environment, and talking through route options as it leads the way... Their work, presented at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pairs a large language model, a system that understands and generates language, with a navigation planner. Together, the two let the robot understand open-ended requests, suggest destinations, and adjust plans on the fly.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
Over Engineered (Score:3)
You don't need a robot dog for this, just a body mounted camera. AR goggles would be ideal for this as they could continually tell you what you're looking at and read text to you.
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The dog is good for carrying the power required for extended run time (though you give some of that back to the motors making it move) and for providing physical cues through the harness.
My change would be to route the voice system through a Bluetooth headset. There's no need for the dog to talk to the entire environment, and it would be harder to hear in urban settings.
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Although. that could probably also be done through a simpler hand-held device, like a virtual cane [google.com].
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I like dogs, so I'm reaching for a use case that justifies the little robopuppy. I reluctantly concede that the virtual cane is likely far more practical.
Speaking of over engineered .... (Score:2)
You don't need a robot dog for this, just a body mounted camera. AR goggles would be ideal for this as they could continually tell you what you're looking at and read text to you.
AR Goggles? These people are blind. Their cell phone and ear buds would accomplish what you describe.
:-)
AR Goggles are an example of over engineering too.
Dogs displace human obstacles (Score:2)
Robotic dogs can be high visibility and include spoken audio warnings. They can carry objects allowing hands free navigation.
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text adventures comes to mind (Score:2)
Text adventures could have some UI similarities with speech based navigation for visually impaired users, whether the navigation aid is dog-shaped or not.
"You are in a dimly lit forest groove. A squirrel sits on a tree stump one metre in front of you. The squirrel looks confused. There are exits to the north, west and east." (or perhaps 9,12 and 3 o clock)
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Sure, but blind people do not want to be eaten by a grue.
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Grues only eat you when there's no light, they are photophobic, blind people do not notice.:-)
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With a real dog: ...
"You are in a dimly lit forest groove. A squirrel
That's not going to end well.
Actually, I'm sure trained guide dogs are squirrel-proof, for most values of "squirrel".
Thanks, editors (Score:2)
Mostly fluff, real metric is robot vs dog nav (Score:2)
Glad you made the effort in the headline to explain what a Guide Dog does.
And much of that functionality is unnecessary. We can already have all those conversations with our cell phones.
The only meaningful behavior of the robot is what a dog would do. Provide subtle "follow me" physical feedback for real time navigation of immediate obstacles and hazards. Yes, wrt hazards, sometimes the dog's feedback is not so subtle. The one and only question is how a robot and a dog compare with respect to such real-time navigation.
Making life worse for the blind w/ hallucinations (Score:2)
"What if you could ask your guide dog where the nearest water fountain is and hear it answer back...
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure one of the things blind people appreciate about seeing-eye dogs is that a dog isn't going to hallucinate whether it's safe or not to walk across the street, and they don't have to worry about getting run over by a truck, exclaim "What the fuck!", and have to listen to a dog reply "It appears that you had a 'Don't Walk' sign, and you're right for calling me out on that..."
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Indeed, and a guide dog is trained specifically to disobey if they sense danger. That is, if the use
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I don't think it's like that. The dog is trained to do specific things and the handler is asking it to do those things. The dog is trained in how to cross a street, so if it's unsafe to do so it'll wait. The dog is trained to not walk out in front of a car, so it'll refuse to do that when asked.
Nearly all creatures have a sense of self-preservation. I'm sure that helps too. Robots don't have that.
Robot dog... (Score:3)
Question: (Score:2)
Does it bite?