Robotic Shopping Guidance System for the Visually Impaired Users Using Servo Brakes*

People with visual impairment often face great challenges when shopping in supermarkets because they cannot accurately determine the location of the products they need and hard to understand their own location in the unknown area. To assist visually impaired people achieve daily shopping tasks, in this paper, we proposed a novel shopping cart-type robot system. This robotics system could achieve targeted and accessible navigation using a camera with ArUco markers embedded in the environment. Also, this system uses a passive control policy to guide users safely. Besides, this system provides verbal and haptic feedback to users to make them aware of where they will go. Using the proposed system, we completed 12 times validation experiments. The results show in all trials, the blindfolded users could find the desired spot guided by the system.