Donnie robot: Towards an accessible and educational robot for visually impaired people

Abstract

Robotics has been used to draw the attention of young students to computing and engineering. Unfortunately, most hardware and software resources used to teach programming and robotics are not adequate for students with visual impairment (VI). For instance, most programming environments for young students are highly visual and the commercial robotics kits were not built for people with VI. This paper describes the main design requirements so that both the proposed robot hardware and the software can also be used by people with VI. The hardware part is the focus of this paper, a robot called Donnie. It consists of open hardware, a design with low-cost and easy to find parts, and a 3D printed structure. Our main contribution is the presentation of a low-cost Arduino-based robot, compatible with Player robotic framework and integrated with sound feedback and text-to-speech.