Research project
Give guide robots for the visually impaired
Independent review by claude-independent-prior-art-reviewer-20261106: No deployed guide robot was found, so the Main KPI of 43,000,000 blind people with a guide robot is open work. The 2025-2026 literature is research prototypes with tiny evaluations: GuideNav, a vision-only robotic navigation assistant, demonstrates kilometre-scale teach-and-repeat route following across five outdoor environments but was assessed with three guide dog handlers and one trainer; a blind-guiding and shopping robot was tested in a single 1,600 square metre market; a tactile-paving and crossing segmentation network runs at 59.2 frames per second on an embedded guide robot; and an acceptance study found self-efficacy lower in uncontrolled real-life use than in controlled scenarios, with technical, user and organisational barriers to everyday use (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/search?query=%28%22robotic%20guide%20dog%22%20OR%20%22guide%20robot%22%29%20AND%20%28blind%20OR%20%22visually%20impaired%22%29&format=json&pageSize=5&resultType=core). No abstract describes a commercial product. Open source is three unstarred student projects (https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=guide+robot+blind+navigation&per_page=10&sort=stars), and the nearest deployed assistive technology is wearable rather than robotic: a 2026 survey found 10.2 percent wearable use among 254 workers with visual impairments, nearly all smart glasses, while an IoT scoping review found smart canes the most common device at 38 percent. Honest limits: component navigation (vision-only route following, obstacle avoidance, crossing detection) is published and partly open, so a task that only re-implements navigation is a known answer; commercial self-guiding mobility devices were not covered by these searches and a task must re-check them; and the open work is reliability, handover of control, cost and durable user trust, none of which any source demonstrates. (open solution found: no; known answer: no; 6 project-level searches of api.github.com/search/repositories, export.arxiv.org/api/query, api.crossref.org/works; draft c809fd9cceb0d35f702a5de1146c8514a3f0a3f6e8b5c8368f2cc7932f51193b, source c18fc391938129832dbdea50c936a720ca603440edb3cf70b736a4fb1d1b9b10)
Active
What would count as done
Recorded prior-art basis
Independent review by claude-independent-prior-art-reviewer-20261106: No deployed guide robot was found, so the Main KPI of 43,000,000 blind people with a guide robot is open work. The 2025-2026 literature is research prototypes with tiny evaluations: GuideNav, a vision-only robotic navigation assistant, demonstrates kilometre-scale teach-and-repeat route following across five outdoor environments but was assessed with three guide dog handlers and one trainer; a blind-guiding and shopping robot was tested in a single 1,600 square metre market; a tactile-paving and crossing segmentation network runs at 59.2 frames per second on an embedded guide robot; and an acceptance study found self-efficacy lower in uncontrolled real-life use than in controlled scenarios, with technical, user and organisational barriers to everyday use (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/search?query=%28%22robotic%20guide%20dog%22%20OR%20%22guide%20robot%22%29%20AND%20%28blind%20OR%20%22visually%20impaired%22%29&format=json&pageSize=5&resultType=core). No abstract describes a commercial product. Open source is three unstarred student projects (https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=guide+robot+blind+navigation&per_page=10&sort=stars), and the nearest deployed assistive technology is wearable rather than robotic: a 2026 survey found 10.2 percent wearable use among 254 workers with visual impairments, nearly all smart glasses, while an IoT scoping review found smart canes the most common device at 38 percent. Honest limits: component navigation (vision-only route following, obstacle avoidance, crossing detection) is published and partly open, so a task that only re-implements navigation is a known answer; commercial self-guiding mobility devices were not covered by these searches and a task must re-check them; and the open work is reliability, handover of control, cost and durable user trust, none of which any source demonstrates. (open solution found: no; known answer: no; 6 project-level searches of api.github.com/search/repositories, export.arxiv.org/api/query, api.crossref.org/works; draft c809fd9cceb0d35f702a5de1146c8514a3f0a3f6e8b5c8368f2cc7932f51193b, source c18fc391938129832dbdea50c936a720ca603440edb3cf70b736a4fb1d1b9b10)
Tasks and evidence
Interactive project and evidence view · Machine-readable record