BIBLIOS

Document type
Conference papers

Document subtype
Full paper

Title
What My Eyes Can't See, A Robot Can Show Me

Participants in the publication
Mayara Bonani (Author)
Raquel Oliveira (Author)
Filipa Correia (Author)
André Rodrigues (Author)
LASIGE
Tiago Guerreiro (Author)
Dep. Informática
LASIGE
Ana Paiva (Author)

Summary
Blind people rely on sighted peers and different assistive technologies to accomplish everyday tasks. In this paper, we explore how assistive robots can go beyond information-giving assistive technologies (e.g., screen readers) by physically collaborating with blind people. We first conducted a set of focus groups to assess how blind people perceive and envision robots. Results showed that, albeit having stereotypical concerns, participants conceive the integration of assistive robots in a broad range of everyday life scenarios and are welcoming of this type of technology. In a second study, we asked blind participants to collaborate with two versions of a robot in a Tangram assembly task: one robot would only provide static verbal instructions whereas the other would physically collaborate with participants and adjust the feedback to their performance. Results showed that active collaboration had a major influence on the successful performance of the task. Participants also reported higher perceived warmth, competence and usefulness when interacting with the physically assistive robot. Overall, we provide preliminary results on the usefulness of assistive robots and the possible role these can hold in fostering a higher degree of autonomy for blind people.


Event
Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - ASSETS '18

Publication Identifiers
ISBN - 9781450356503

Address
Galway, Ireland

Publisher
ACM Press

Document Identifiers
DOI - https://doi.org/10.1145/3234695.3239330
URL - http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3234695.3239330

Rankings
Google Metrics (2019) - 26