Science, technology and innovation news website New Atlas has reported how guide dogs are going robotic and have even added conversation to their array of skills.
The website said the development can bring major benefits including cutting training costs and providing important wayfinding information.
The report explored the case of Shiqi Zhang, an associate professor at Binghamton University in New York state, who in 2022 went trick-or-treating with his students and a quadruped robotic dog.
A year later he decided to give the dog a more important role and trained it to respond to leash tugs to help it work more like a guide dog. Now, Zhang and his team have gone one step further and trained a Unitree Go2 robotic dog using a large language model via AI tool GPT-4 to question and respond to cues from the user and the environment.
The report said real guide dogs take a long time to train, with only 50-60% completing the training programmes. Costs range between US$20,000-50,000 and as a result, only about 2-5% of the blind community are able to have a seeing-eye dog.
Zhang said: “We’re demonstrating an aspect of the robotic guide dog that is more advanced than biological guide dogs. Real dogs can understand around 20 commands at best. But for robotic guide dogs, you can just put GPT-4 with voice commands. Then it has very strong language capabilities.”
To test the robo dogs, Zhang’s team recruited seven blind participants who were asked to navigate a big multi-room indoor environment. The bot first asked each participant where they wanted to go, and then as it was guiding them there, provided clues about the environment such as: “this is a long corridor” or “you’re passing by the main lobby.”
Based on questionnaire data at the end of each test, the participants indicated that they preferred the combination of verbal and physical guidance through the environment rather than just being pulled along.
However the participants did give the robo dog slightly lower marks in terms of its perceived safety, which the researchers say is likely to do with the unfamiliarity of walking alongside a robot.
Zhang said: “They were super excited about the technology, about the robots. They asked many questions. They really see the potential for the technology and hope to see this working.”
Now the researchers plan to carry out more studies in which the bots will navigate longer distances both indoors and out.