Quadrupedal Robotic Guide Dog with Vocal Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

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.