Development of a robotic application with voice to guide vision impairment people indoor environments based on Robotic Operating System

Abstract

Blindness is one of the most widespread disabilities in people around the world, these people cannot lead a normal life due to the limitation of their movements even in their homes. Most of them, need the assistance of someone or something. The navigation robots have the potential to overcome this limitations, they are presented as a good alternative for them, since they can be controllated by voice, buttons and others, they can also be adapted to the requirements of vision impairmed people. In this article is developed a voice-comands robotic aplication to indicate the indoor destination and then associate it to a coordinate in the map based on Turtlebot3, Pocketsphinx, Robotic Operating System (ROS) and Text to Speech (TTS) like Talkey, of this way the robot guides the patient to his destination through a path that this traces it. Finally, tests were carried out in six patients applying the usability test, it was possible to obtain an average greater than eighty, we found that application's performance was very well, exceeding expectations in patient trust and safety.