  Guidance robots that can guide people and avoid various obstacles, could
potentially be owned by more visually impaired people at a fairly low cost.
Most of the previous guidance robots for the visually impaired ignored the
human response behavior and comfort, treating the human as an appendage dragged
by the robot, which can lead to imprecise guidance of the human and sudden
changes in the traction force experienced by the human. In this paper, we
propose a novel quadruped guidance robot system with a comfort-based concept.
We design a controllable traction device that can adjust the length and force
between human and robot to ensure comfort. To allow the human to be guided
safely and comfortably to the target position in complex environments, our
proposed human motion planner can plan the traction force with the force-based
human motion model. To track the planned force, we also propose a robot motion
planner that can generate the specific robot motion command and design the
force control device. Our system has been deployed on Unitree Laikago
quadrupedal platform and validated in real-world scenarios.
