A route comprehension support system for a robotic travel aid

We have developed a robotic travel aid that can provide assistance to guide visually impaired people. According to the opinions of visually impaired people, for such travel aids to be safe and easy to use, the person being guided must be able to comprehend their route from the point of departure to their destination before starting off on their journey. Therefore, we have developed a route comprehension support system to be used as a subsystem in such a robotic travel aid. This system generates an explanation of the route that will be taken by the user on the basis of an XML file containing route information. In addition, we have designed an interface that takes into consideration the user's disabilities by using a combination of a touch keypad and speech synthesis. The system is able to make use of the fully functioning senses of the user to acquire information regarding the environment through which the user is passing, for instance, the user's sense of distance and information regarding how they control the robot, and generates route guidance instructions including information regarding footpaths, traffic controls, and the shape and size of intersections that can be confirmed by the user. We have verified the effectiveness of this guide system by means of experiments to evaluate the route understanding system with seven visually impaired subjects and experiments to evaluate the guidance performance of the system with four subjects; in both cases the system receiving positive evaluations.