RoboCart: Grocery shopping solution for the visually impaired
U0204714 Chan HongjiangHuman-robot interaction (HRI) has always been an exciting field of study in the area of assistive robotics; however, much of it has been based on the assumption that the human involved has visual capabilities of identifying and making use of the robot.
In 2004, researchers from the Computer Science Assistive Technology Laboratory of the Department of Computer Science of Utah State University launched a project to build a robotic shopping cart for the visually impaired. The objective was to allow the visually impaired to be able to navigate and shop for grocery by themselves, with the aid of a robot. The RoboCart is designed to navigate to any location in the supermarket desired by the user.
The RoboCart project takes into many considerations, most importantly of which is the ergonomical aspect of the human-robot interaction process for the visually impaired. A special handlebar with a keypad allows the user to input instructions to the shopping cart and hold on to the shopping cart for guidance with one hand only while leaving the other hand free for a guide dog or a white cane. Audio guidance is also provided to the user to pre-inform him of the direction the shopping cart is headed to next. This elegant solution was achieved only through much trial and error with various possible solutions like speech recognition, guide leash instead of a static handle, and dynamic Braille displays for output.
Another area of research is how the RoboCart finds its way around the supermarket. Various solutions have been implemented for other robotic applications, including GPS, visual mapping through onboard/environment cameras, mapping through active beacons in intelligent space and so on. For the RoboCart project, the choice was a combination of position identification through RFID and line-following along the supermarket aisles. Line following is simple to implement and recent advancement in RFID has made it a very affordable technology for mass implementation.
As the consumer robotics market advances, we can expect a boom in the number and types of assistive robots to be developed and marketed, catering to humans from all walks of life, for all walks of life :)
References:
http://cc.usu.edu/~cpg/pubs/iros05.pdf
http://cc.usu.edu/~cpg/pubs/hri2006_ergo.pdf
