Robot-Assisted Shopping for the Visually Impaired: Proof-of-Concept Design and Feasibility Evaluation

Abstract

This article presents RoboCart, a proof-of-concept prototype of a robotic shopping cart for the visually impaired in supermarkets. RoboCart autonomously leads shoppers to required locations and cues them through synthetic speech and a portable barcode reader to the salient features of the environment sufficient for product retrieval. In a longitudinal pilot feasibility study, visually impaired shoppers (n = 10) used the device to retrieve products in Lee's MarketPlace, a supermarket in Logan, Utah. The main finding is that RoboCart enables visually impaired shoppers to reliably and independently navigate to and retrieve products in a real supermarket.