RAIS: Towards A Robotic Mapping and Assessment Tool for Indoor Accessibility Using Commodity Hardware

Mapping, assessing, and creating personalized routes of indoor spaces for people with disabilities remains a grand challenge in accessibility research. Drawing on recent work in robotics as well as emergent work in smartphone-based mapping, we introduce RAIS (Robotic Accessibility Indoor Scanner), a robotic-based indoor mapping and accessibility assessment system. As a rapid prototype, RAIS is constructed with off-the-shelf components including a vacuum robot, smartphone, and phone gimbal along with a modified version of our previous LiDAR-based accessibility scannar RASSAR. In a preliminary evaluation of three indoor spaces, we demonstrate RAIS’s ability to autonomously scan spaces, produce detailed 3D reconstructions, and find and highlight accessibility issues.