Best Paper Award at CHI 2024 for guide-dog robot study
“Towards Robotic Companions: Understanding Handler–Guide Dog Interactions for Informed Guide Dog Robot Design” received a Best Paper Award at CHI 2024 — an honor given to the top 1% of submissions.
The study drew on 23 visually impaired guide-dog handlers and 5 guide-dog trainers to work out what a guide-dog robot actually needs: the right balance between robot autonomy and human control, at least a two-hour battery, multiple camera orientations for obstacle detection, audio sensing for hazards, and an understanding of contextual commands such as “sidewalk.” As Prof. Kim puts it, “there are 40 years of study there, and none of these robots are actually used by end users” — this work is about closing that gap.
Led by Hochul Hwang, with co-authors Hee-Tae Jung, Nicholas Giudice, Joydeep Biswas, and Sunghoon Ivan Lee.