  Guide dogs play a critical role in the lives of many, however training them
is a time- and labor-intensive process. We are developing a method to allow an
autonomous robot to physically guide humans using direct human-robot
communication. The proposed algorithm will be deployed on a Unitree A1
quadrupedal robot and will autonomously navigate the person to their
destination while communicating with the person using a speech interface
compatible with the robot. This speech interface utilizes cloud based services
such as Amazon Polly and Google Cloud to serve as the text-to-speech and
speech-to-text engines.
