Mobile robots for an E-mail interface for people who are blind

Abstract

The availability of inexpensive robotic hardware has brought to realization the dream of having autonomous mobile robots around us. As such, the research community has recently manifested more interest in assisting robotic technology (see proceedings of the last two IEEE ROMAN conferences, the emergence of the RoboCup@Home challenge at RoboCup and the first annual Human Computer Interaction Conference jointly sponsored by IEEE and ACM). Robots provide to the blind what was lost as textual interfaces were replaced by GUIs. This paper describes the design, implementation and testing of a first prototype of a multi-modal Human-Robot Interface for people with Vision Impairment. The robot used is the commercially available four legged SONY Aibo. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.