  Persons with visual impairments (PwVI) have difficulties understanding and
navigating spaces around them. Current wayfinding technologies either focus
solely on navigation or provide limited communication about the environment.
Motivated by recent advances in visual-language grounding and semantic
navigation, we propose DRAGON, a guiding robot powered by a dialogue system and
the ability to associate the environment with natural language. By
understanding the commands from the user, DRAGON is able to guide the user to
the desired landmarks on the map, describe the environment, and answer
questions from visual observations. Through effective utilization of dialogue,
the robot can ground the user's free-form descriptions to landmarks in the
environment, and give the user semantic information through spoken language. We
conduct a user study with blindfolded participants in an everyday indoor
environment. Our results demonstrate that DRAGON is able to communicate with
the user smoothly, provide a good guiding experience, and connect users with
their surrounding environment in an intuitive manner. Videos and code are
available at https://sites.google.com/view/dragon-wayfinding/home.
