Haptic Assistance and Augmented Sensing for Enhancing Autonomy of Visually Impaired People
an RSS 2019 Event
June 22, 2019 - Freiburg im Breisgau, DE
This Workshop is supported by the MIT-UNIPI project "Haptic Assistance in Autonomous Walking for Visually Impaired People".
Visual impairment affects approximately 253 million people worldwide, of which 36 million are blind, and 217 million have moderate to severe vision impairment. Vision loss limits the quality-of-life of the affected individuals and their families, and furthermore represents an economic burden to society. Enhancing the autonomy of Visually Impaired People is mandatory to improve their life conditions but also to reduce social costs. Autonomous walking and navigation represents a crucial component for personal autonomy. Recently, advanced technological solutions in perception and sensory substitution (audio or, more effectively, tactile) have been developed to address this issue. However, the proposed systems have been often met with scarce acceptance by end users. Reasons for this are related to social obtrusiveness of those systems, the lack of compact and discreet solutions as well as insufficient navigational stimuli. This workshop will focus on recent advancements for augmented sensing and assistance to enhance blind people’s autonomy in everyday life actions, with special attention to solutions for autonomous walking in indoor and outdoor environments. This challenge requires a multidisciplinary effort to integrate different aspects of robotics research such as perception, planning, navigation, and haptics, with a thorough investigation of VIP sensory-motor apparatus and technological accessibility.
The nature of this workshop is by definition multidisciplinary, since it tackle different technological and scientific issues, from sensing to device design and control, aiming at fostering cross-fertilization and discussions between researchers, end users and technology developers. Attention will be focused, although not limited to
- Perception systems and algorithms to parse the environment;
- Haptic stimulation strategies to deliver space-related instructions to visually impaired (VIP);
- Planning algorithms specifically designed for blind people in different environments and walking conditions;
- Sensing (vision and non-vision-based) and integration techniques for the development and control of autonomous systems for the enhancement of VIP autonomy;
- User’s point of view and accessibility evaluation.
Experts from these areas will gave talks on these topics.
The workshop had several invited speakers as well as two poster sessions to allow researchers to present their current work, allowing open-ended discussions and interactions.
With the support of the IEEE Ras Technical Committees on Haptics, Wearable Robotics
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 688857 (SoftPro).
The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the authors. The European Commission or its services cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
