AbilityTech, the citizen science hub in DesignLab for the development of enabling technologies, has been approached by a client who would like to explore the possibilities of designing and using a robot guide dog. With current advances in hardware and sensing, it should be possible to find a robotic alternative for man's best friend.
The client's list of requirements is very exhaustive, leading to a very complex (wicked) problem space. In order to make headway, we would like to start bottom-up (so we start by training a robot puppy). The pup will be equipped with Lidar, 3D vision, and speech recognition, potentially running on ROS2 on Raspberry Pi5 or a similar embedded target.
The goal of this assignment is to explore how far this set of technology can take us by building the robot pup, explore the current state of the art in robotic assistance, develop a number of application scenarios and come up with a roadmap for further research.