HapticRein: Design and Development of an Interactive Haptic Rein for a Guidance Robot

Abstract

In daily life, a guide dog as a companion assists blind and visually impaired people (BVIP) to perform independent and safe journey. However, due to several reasons (e.g., cost and long-term training) only a few BVIP would own their guide dogs. To let much more BVIP would have accessible guidance services in unfamiliar public or private areas, we plan to develop an interactive guide dog robot prototype. In this paper, we present one of the most important components of a guidance robot for BVIP, an interactive haptic rein which consists of force-sensing sensors to control and balance the walking speed between BVIP and robots in a natural way, and vibrated actuators under fingers to acquire haptic information, e.g., turning left/right. The results of preliminary user studies indicated that the proposed haptic rein allow BVIP to control and communicate with a guidance robot via a natural haptic interaction.