An Indoor Navigation Service Robot System Based On Vibration Tactile Feedback

With the development of technology and the increase of our society demand,the efficiency,reliability and applicability of the traditional navigation methods based on the canes and guide dogs have been lagged behind.To solve the problem,more and more researchers began to develop all kinds of intelligent navigation devices.The service robots are gradually used in the medical,cleaning,security and other fields.In this paper,the service robot is applied into the navigation aid to help the visually impaired and those who need the help of guidance.An indoor navigation service robot system based on vibration tactile feedback is proposed in this paper.The proposed system not only can help the blind overcome the difficulty in walking,but also can service the normal in a complex and unknown indoor environment with limited vision.The system includes a robot platform and a vibration haptic feedback device.The robot platform consists of a service robot,a Kinect sensor,a ZigBee wireless module and a tablet PC.The designed service robot is a small tracked mobile robot,its mechanical design,hardware design and software design are introduced respectively in the paper.The Kinect sensor can capture the image of the user to achieve the position information.The ZigBee module is responsible to send the vibration feedback scheme to the feedback device.Moreover,a human-guidance algorithm is presented based on the basic leader-follower model to keep the relative distance and orientation between the human and the robot in a desired scope.In the guidance,the user is free to decide the linear velocity,and the angular velocity is appropriately adjusted by the vibro-tactile feedback.A wearable vibro-tactile bracelet is designed as the feedback device.According to the specific deviation of the relative distance and orientation,the vibro-tactile feedback scheme is presented to provide the adjustment advice to the user in the form of the vibrational signal of the bracelet.The systematic experiments are performed in the paper.The basic motion,obstacle avoidance and other abilities of the service robot are testified.The tactile perception experiments show the effectiveness of the tactile indication method of the bracelet.The trajectory following experiments on the flat ground and the adaptability test on the undulating terrain are performed to verify the feasibility of the system.The L-shaped path following tests show the mean deviation distance is about 0.17 m and the average time is 61s.Compare with the cane-guided method,the robot-guided method has less deviation distance and consuming time.The results of the user acceptance tests show the rather high evaluation of the convenience,user-friendliness and effectiveness of the system.Finally,the anti-interference ability of the system is analyzed and verified via some experiments.