NavVI: A Telerobotic Simulation with Multimodal Feedback for Visually Impaired Navigation in Warehouse Environments
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Abstract
Industrial warehouses are congested with moving forklifts, shelves and personnel, making robot teleoperation particularly risky and demanding for blind and low-vision (BLV) operators. Although accessible teleoperation plays a key role in inclusive workforce participation, systematic research on its use in industrial environments is limited, and few existing studies barely address multimodal guidance designed for BLV users. We present a novel multimodal guidance simulator that enables BLV users to control a mobile robot through a high-fidelity warehouse environment while simultaneously receiving synchronized visual, auditory, and haptic feedback. The system combines a navigation mesh with regular re-planning so routes remain accurate avoiding collisions as forklifts and human avatars move around the warehouse. Users with low vision are guided with a visible path line towards destination; navigational voice cues with clockwise directions announce upcoming turns, and finally proximity-based haptic feedback notifies the users of static and moving obstacles in the path. This real-time, closed-loop system offers a repeatable testbed and algorithmic reference for accessible teleoperation research. The simulator's design principles can be easily adapted to real robots due to the alignment of its navigation, speech, and haptic modules with commercial hardware, supporting rapid feasibility studies and deployment of inclusive telerobotic tools in actual warehouses.
