GuideTWSI named an ICRA 2026 Award Finalist

GuideTWSI — “A Diverse Tactile Walking Surface Indicator Dataset from Synthetic and Real-World Images for Blind and Low-Vision Navigation” — has been selected as an Award Finalist at ICRA 2026.

The lab has a second paper at ICRA 2026 as well: “Human-Centered Development of Guide Dog Robots: Quiet and Stable Locomotion Control” (oral presentation), which makes a quadruped guide robot markedly quieter and steadier — important when users rely on their hearing for safety. Noise-reduction video.

GuideTWSI is led by Hochul Hwang; the locomotion paper by Shangqun Yu. Both are part of the guide-dog robot project, with collaborators Soowan Yang, Anh Nguyen, Parth Goel, Krisha Adhikari, and Trung Dang, and co-advisors Joydeep Biswas, Sunghoon Ivan Lee, and Nicholas Giudice.

• GuideTWSI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07060
• Quiet & Stable Locomotion Control: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11808