Robotic Guide Dog: Leading a Human with Leash-Guided Hybrid Physical Interaction

Abstract

An autonomous robot that is able to physically guide humans through narrow and cluttered spaces could be a big boon to the visually-impaired. Most prior robotic guiding systems are based on wheeled platforms with large bases with actuated rigid guiding canes. The large bases and the actuated arms limit these prior approaches from operating in narrow and cluttered environments. We propose a method that introduces a quadrupedal robot with a leash to enable the robot-guidinghuman system to change its intrinsic dimension (by letting the leash go slack) in order to fit into narrow spaces. We propose a hybrid physical Human Robot Interaction model that involves leash tension to describe the dynamical relationship in the robot-guiding-human system. This hybrid model is utilized in a mixed-integer programming problem to develop a reactive planner that is able to utilize slack-taut switching to guide a blind-folded person to safely travel in a confined space. The proposed leash-guided robot framework is deployed on a Mini Cheetah quadrupedal robot and validated in experiments (Video 1 ).

Terrain-perception-free Quadrupedal Spinning Locomotion on Versatile Terrains: Modeling, Analysis, and Experimental Validation

“…For the robot counterpart, spinning gait is also an indispensable component to fulfill for trajectory tracking tasks in autonomous navigation L. Ruan is with Beijing Institute of General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), Beijing, 100000, China N. Boyd, Z. Zhou and Y. Zhao are with the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. [12], because any curves can be decoupled into forward, lateral, and spinning locomotions [13]- [15]. However, the highly dynamic spinning is still challenging due to the complex dynamics, such as uncertain contact, inaccurate foot placement, potential tripping, etc.…”