Seita Kayukawa

We present an assistive suitcase system, BBeep, for supporting blind people when walking through crowded environments. BBeep uses pre-emptive sound notifications to help clear a path by alerting both the user and nearby pedestrians about the potential risk of collision. BBeep triggers notifications by tracking pedestrians, predicting their future position in real-time, and provides sound notifications only when it anticipates a future collision. We investigate how different types and timings of

We present a guiding system to help blind people walk in public spaces while making their walking seamless with nearby pedestrians. Blind users carry a rolling suitcase-shaped system that has two RGBD Cameras, an inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor, and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor. The system senses the behavior of surrounding pedestrians, predicts risks of collisions, and alerts users to help them avoid collisions. It has two modes: the "on-path" mode that helps users avoid co

Blind people face various local navigation challenges in their daily lives such as identifying empty seats in crowded stations, navigating toward a seat, and stopping and sitting at the correct spot. Although voice navigation is a commonly used solution, it requires users to carefully follow frequent navigational sounds over short distances. Therefore, we presented an assistive robot, BlindPilot, which guides blind users to landmark objects using an intuitive handle. BlindPilot employs an RGB-D

Enabling blind visitors to explore museum floors while feeling the facility’s atmosphere and increasing their autonomy and enjoyment are imperative for giving them a high-quality museum experience. We designed a science museum exploration system for blind visitors using an autonomous navigation robot. Blind users can control the robot to navigate them toward desired exhibits while playing short audio descriptions along the route. They can also browse detailed explanations on their smartphones an

Autonomous navigation robots have a considerable potential to offer a new form of mobility aid to people with visual impairments. However, to deploy such robots in public buildings, it is imperative to receive acceptance from not only robot users but also people that use the buildings and managers of those facilities. Therefore, we conducted three studies to investigate the acceptance and concerns of our prototype robot, which looks like a regular suitcase. First, an online survey revealed that

We present a system to allow blind people to stand in line in public spaces by using an off-the-shelf smartphone only. The technologies to navigate blind pedestrians in public spaces are rapidly improving, but tasks which require to understand surrounding people's behavior are still difficult to assist. Standing in line at shops, stations, and other crowded places is one of such tasks. Therefore, we developed a system to detect and notify the distance to a person in front continuously by using a

We present an interactive route viewer system, 3DMovieMap, which generates and shows navigation movies walking through multi-level buildings, such as a science museum, airport, and university building. Movie map systems can provide users with visual cues by synthesizing navigation movies based on their inputs of routes. However, existing systems are limited to flat areas such as city areas. We aim to extend Movie Map to generate navigation movies for multi-level buildings. The 3DMovieMap system

This work presents the Dynamic Object Scanning (DO-Scanning), a novel interface that helps users browse long and untrimmed first-person videos quickly. The proposed interface offers users a small set of object cues generated automatically tailored to the context of a given video. Users choose which cue to highlight, and the interface in turn adaptively fast-forwards the video while keeping scenes with highlighted cues played at original speed. Our experimental results have revealed that the DO-S

This work presents the Dynamic Object Scanning (DO-Scanning), a novel interface that helps users browse long and untrimmed first-person videos quickly. The proposed interface offers users a small set of object cues generated automatically tailored to the context of a given video. Users choose which cue to highlight, and the interface in turn fast-forwards the video adaptively while keeping scenes with highlighted cues played at original speed. Our experimental results have revealed that the DO-S