  People with visual impairments (PwVI) often have difficulties navigating
through unfamiliar indoor environments. However, current wayfinding tools are
fairly limited. In this short paper, we present our in-progress work on a
wayfinding robot for PwVI. The robot takes an audio command from the user that
specifies the intended destination. Then, the robot autonomously plans a path
to navigate to the goal. We use sensors to estimate the real-time position of
the user, which is fed to the planner to improve the safety and comfort of the
user. In addition, the robot describes the surroundings to the user
periodically to prevent disorientation and potential accidents. We demonstrate
the feasibility of our design in a public indoor environment. Finally, we
analyze the limitations of our current design, as well as our insights and
future work. A demonstration video can be found at
https://youtu.be/BS9r5bkIass.
