<p>Dancing with others is a key recreational activity that promotes physical fitness and mental well-being. For most people, dancing with a partner is relatively easy. However, for visually impaired individuals, this activity presents challenges, such as not knowing where their dance partner is or being unable to synchronize their dance movements due to the lack of visual feedback. Traditionally, visually impaired individuals need a trained human dancer to guide them, which limits their accessibility to social dancing. With advancements in robotics, several systems have been developed to help visually impaired individuals navigate to specific locations or follow particular paths without human assistance. However, these systems can only guide visually impaired users to follow their dance partner without the ability to synchronize their motions with the partner. In this paper, we propose a novel robotic system with a motion capture system and a haptic vest designed to assist visually impaired individuals in dancing. The motion capture system acts as the user’s eyes, perceiving information such as the user’s location, the partner’s position, nearby obstacles, and the partner’s dance motions. Based on this information, the system indicates to the user where the partner is, whether the users are approaching walls or people, and what dance motions their partner is performing via a haptic vest with different vibration patterns. This enables the user to navigate to their partner and perform synchronized dance movements without occupying the user’s auditory channel. Besides, considering the fact that visually impaired people, during dynamic movement without any tools like white canes, may fall and encounter collisions with walls or people even if they understand where their partners and walls are through indications from haptic feedback, a powered wheelchair is used to reduce these risks by automatically stop when potential collisions occur. Moreover, we employ an IMU-based hands-free interface that translates the user’s torso inclination angles into velocity commands for the wheelchair, enabling the user to control the robot while keeping their hands free for performing dance movements. Through an information mapping experiment and a dance guidance experiment, we confirmed that the proposed system could convey understandable information to the blindfolded users and assist them in dancing with their partners.</p>

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Robotic wheelchair system for inclusive dance support for the visually impaired people with haptic feedback and hands-free control

  • Zhenyu Liao,
  • Yasuhisa Hirata

摘要

Dancing with others is a key recreational activity that promotes physical fitness and mental well-being. For most people, dancing with a partner is relatively easy. However, for visually impaired individuals, this activity presents challenges, such as not knowing where their dance partner is or being unable to synchronize their dance movements due to the lack of visual feedback. Traditionally, visually impaired individuals need a trained human dancer to guide them, which limits their accessibility to social dancing. With advancements in robotics, several systems have been developed to help visually impaired individuals navigate to specific locations or follow particular paths without human assistance. However, these systems can only guide visually impaired users to follow their dance partner without the ability to synchronize their motions with the partner. In this paper, we propose a novel robotic system with a motion capture system and a haptic vest designed to assist visually impaired individuals in dancing. The motion capture system acts as the user’s eyes, perceiving information such as the user’s location, the partner’s position, nearby obstacles, and the partner’s dance motions. Based on this information, the system indicates to the user where the partner is, whether the users are approaching walls or people, and what dance motions their partner is performing via a haptic vest with different vibration patterns. This enables the user to navigate to their partner and perform synchronized dance movements without occupying the user’s auditory channel. Besides, considering the fact that visually impaired people, during dynamic movement without any tools like white canes, may fall and encounter collisions with walls or people even if they understand where their partners and walls are through indications from haptic feedback, a powered wheelchair is used to reduce these risks by automatically stop when potential collisions occur. Moreover, we employ an IMU-based hands-free interface that translates the user’s torso inclination angles into velocity commands for the wheelchair, enabling the user to control the robot while keeping their hands free for performing dance movements. Through an information mapping experiment and a dance guidance experiment, we confirmed that the proposed system could convey understandable information to the blindfolded users and assist them in dancing with their partners.