Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Online Learning And Planning For Crowd-Aware Service Robot Navigation, Anoop Aroor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mobile service robots are increasingly used in indoor environments (e.g., shopping malls or museums) among large crowds of people. To efficiently navigate in these environments, such a robot should be able to exhibit a variety of behaviors. It should avoid crowded areas, and not oppose the flow of the crowd. It should be able to identify and avoid specific crowds that result in additional delays (e.g., children in a particular area might slow down the robot). and to seek out a crowd if its task requires it to interact with as many people as possible. These behaviors require the ability …

A Mobile Cyber-Physical System Framework For Aiding People With Visual Impairment, Martin Goldberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is a challenging problem for researchers and engineers in the assistive technology (AT) community to provide suitable solutions for visually impaired people (VIPs) through AT to meet orientation, navigation and mobility (ONM) needs. Given the spectrum of assistive technologies currently available for the purposes of aiding VIPs with ONM, our literature review and survey have shown that there is a reluctance to adopt these technological solutions in the VIP community.

Motivated by these findings, we think it critical to re-examine and rethink the approaches that have been taken. It is our belief that we need to take a different …