Blind Wal-Mart shoppers at the North Logan,
Utah, store will be testing a robot guide soon, maybe even as we
speak, since the machines arrived on Thursday, May 5, 2005:
choosing from a Braille products listing on the robot's handle, the
machine uses RFID tags and sonar to navigate around the store to
the items the shopper wants.
'There are RFID sensors placed on the shelves in the
store. The robot has the RFID antennae and detects the presence of
those tags,' [Vladimir] Kulyukin [assistant professor of computer
science at Utah State University and the director of the
university's Computer Science Assistive Technology Laboratory]
said. 'That's how it knows it's reached the Colgate section of the
toothpaste shelf and it then announces, "You have reached the
Colgate toothpaste section, on your right."'
The RFID tags haven't gotten to item-level tagging yet, only to the
level where the part of the shelf where the product is supposed to
be is tagged. So if the shelf area is empty or a different product
is in the spot, the robot and RFID tags don't pick that up. The
Computer Science Assistive Technology Laboratory team is working on
a feature where the robot scans the item's bar code and announces
what product is going into the shopping cart.
HT to
Wal-Mart Tests Robots for Blind Shoppers at
Rich Burridge's
Weblog, which links to the
eWeek article, which itself links to the full article at
CIOInsight.com:
Wal-Mart
Tests Robots for Blind Shoppers.
A legally blind computer book author posted a comment to the eWeek
article
here.