Dog guides offer an effective mobility solution for blind or visually impaired (BVI) individuals, but conventional dog guides have limitations including the need for care, potential distractions, societal prejudice, high costs, and limited availability. To address these challenges, we seek to develop a robot dog guide capable of performing the tasks of a conventional dog guide, enhanced with additional features. In this work, we focus on design research to identify functional and aesthetic design concepts to implement into a quadrupedal robot. The aesthetic design remains relevant even for BVI users due to their sensitivity toward societal perceptions and the need for smooth integration into society. We collected data through interviews and surveys to answer specific design questions pertaining to the appearance, texture, features, and method of controlling and communicating with the robot. Our study identified essential and preferred features for a future robot dog guide, which are supported by relevant statistics aligning with each suggestion. These findings will inform the future development of user-centered designs to effectively meet the needs of BVI individuals.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Two winters ago, more than a year after my old college roommate and dear friend Paul was diagnosed with ALS, he started making pictures. By then, he was gradually losing the ability to do almost everything else. He could still walk at that point, often through the leafy corner of his Boston neighborhood, Jamaica Plain, where the old tree limbs cradled the houses and the streets were barely wide enough for a car, but only with the help of a cane. A condition of the disease called bulbar palsy slowed his tongue to the point his words wobbled enough that he sounded as if he were drunk. He could eat solid foods, albeit with some trouble, and could drink the Relyvrio medication powder he swirled with a spoon into a glass of water twice daily--a prescription for ALS that last year clinical trials suggested was ineffective, and a cocktail so bitter it made him physically wince--but he began coughing more and more as he labored to swallow anything at all.

Friday was the final day of the show -- and team Engadget has departed Las Vegas. Our reporters and editors spent the week scouring endless carpeted convention halls of the CES show floor, braving lines of chain smokers, overcoming nasty colds and sore ankles and fielding thousands of emails a day to find the best and most credible products at the show. It was quite the challenge, as the landscape was dotted with countless contenders. As expected, the vast majority of things we saw this CES had an AI component, with a noticeable uptick in AR glasses, hearing aid earbuds, solar-powered tech, robot vacuums and even emotional support robots. Our team was encouraged to see more growth in tech built to improve the lives of those with disabilities and mobility issues, too. For all the new iterations we saw on traditional tech like laptops, TVs and soundbars, we saw a bevy of wonderfully weird off-beat tech at the show, too.

As we finish up our live coverage of all things CES, it's time to pick the best in show. So many of the new things we saw this year had an AI component, with a noticeable uptick in AR glasses, hearing aid earbuds, solar-powered tech, emotional support robots and robot vacuums. Our list of CES 2025 winners covers various categories, ranging from typical Engadgety things like PCs, home entertainment and gaming to themed winners in sustainability and accessibility. In fact, our best-in-show winner was an accessibility pick: the WeWalk Smart Cane 2. A high-tech version of the mobility cane for people who are blind seemed like the best helpful application of AI. With a new voice assistant powered by GPT, users can speak directly to the cane to get navigation guidance, with sensors that alert the user of upcoming obstacles.

CES 2025 is coming to a close, and team Engadget is ready to leave Las Vegas. Our reporters and editors have scoured endless carpeted convention halls, braved lines of chain smokers and fielded thousands of emails a day to find the best and most credible products at the show. As expected, the vast majority of things we saw this CES had an AI component, with a noticeable uptick in AR glasses, hearing aid earbuds, solar-powered tech, emotional support robots and robot vacuums. Apparently people really like robovacs that can pick up socks. Our team was encouraged to see more growth in tech built to improve the lives of those with disabilities and mobility issues, too. Our list of CES 2025 winners covers a variety of categories, ranging from typical areas like home entertainment, transportation and smart home to theme-based topics like sustainability and accessibility.

The ability to shop independently, especially in grocery stores, is important for maintaining a high quality of life. This can be particularly challenging for people with visual impairments (PVI). Stores carry thousands of products, with approximately 30,000 new products introduced each year in the US market alone, presenting a challenge even for modern computer vision solutions. Through this work, we present a proof-of-concept socially assistive robotic system we call ShelfHelp, and propose novel technical solutions for enhancing instrumented canes traditionally meant for navigation tasks with additional capability within the domain of shopping. ShelfHelp includes a novel visual product locator algorithm designed for use in grocery stores and a novel planner that autonomously issues verbal manipulation guidance commands to guide the user during product retrieval. Through a human subjects study, we show the system's success in locating and providing effective manipulation guidance to retrieve desired products with novice users. We compare two autonomous verbal guidance modes achieving comparable performance to a human assistance baseline and present encouraging findings that validate our system's efficiency and effectiveness and through positive subjective metrics including competence, intelligence, and ease of use.

Robotic pruning of dormant grapevines is an area of active research in order to promote vine balance and grape quality, but so far robotic efforts have largely focused on planar, simplified vines not representative of commercial vineyards. This paper aims to advance the robotic perception capabilities necessary for pruning in denser and more complex vine structures by extending plant skeletonization techniques. The proposed pipeline generates skeletal grapevine models that have lower reprojection error and higher connectivity than baseline algorithms. We also show how 3D and skeletal information enables prediction accuracy of pruning weight for dense vines surpassing prior work, where pruning weight is an important vine metric influencing pruning site selection.

To answer this question, we first need to understand that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a tool that bases its responses on the database that we provide to it. Otherwise, it has no source to draw an answer from by itself. As we know, the information available on the internet today is inmense, and we need to have a certain degree of discernment to distinguish what is true from the false. Additionally, we should also consider that there are "half-truths", perspectives, beliefs, etc. that could make different statements true. For example, a sensationalist news headline like "Teen declares he will kill everyone for a video game console" may lead the reader to believe something entirely different from what the article describes later: "The teen is participating in a video game tournament where the character must kill their alien opponents within the game, and if successful, he will break the record and win a video game console."

Guiding robots, in the form of canes or cars, have recently been explored to assist blind and low vision (BLV) people. Such robots can provide full or partial autonomy when guiding. However, the pros and cons of different forms and autonomy for guiding robots remain unknown. We sought to fill this gap. We designed autonomy-switchable guiding robotic cane and car. We conducted a controlled lab-study (N=12) and a field study (N=9) on BLV. Results showed that full autonomy received better walking performance and subjective ratings in the controlled study, whereas participants used more partial autonomy in the natural environment as demanding more control. Besides, the car robot has demonstrated abilities to provide a higher sense of safety and navigation efficiency compared with the cane robot. Our findings offered empirical evidence about how the BLV community perceived different machine forms and autonomy, which can inform the design of assistive robots.

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a robotic'smart' cane that guides people with visual impairments using technology originated for autonomous vehicles. Most sensor canes use ultrasound to notify a user that there's some object directly in front of or above them. But the team at Stanford's Intelligent Systems Laboratory equipped their augmented cane with a LIDAR sensor, a laser-based technology used in some self-driving cars to measure the distance of nearby obstacles. The cane also incorporates smartphone-style GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers, and gyroscopes to monitor a user's position, orientation, speed and direction. A motorized, omnidirectional wheel on the bottom tip maintains contact with the ground and gently tugs and nudges users around impediments.